


Sympathy for the Devil

by EAWeek



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Body Horror, Child Abuse, Childhood Memories, Gallifrey, M/M, Male Slash, Mystery, Time Lords and Ladies, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-01
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-26 16:05:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 50,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3856693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EAWeek/pseuds/EAWeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor is determined to find the meaning of the drums the Master claims to hear in his mind. The truth may be more than either of them had bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sympathy for the Devil--Part One

**Author's Note:**

> I first posted this story at fanfiction.net back in November 2007. Since then, the story has been rendered somewhat alt-timeline by events on the show. 
> 
> Be aware that this story is dark and tragic, and it deals with some pretty mature and potentially disturbing subject matter. This is definitely not a piece for younger readers.
> 
> I'm migrating a lot of my fanfics over to AO3--mostly shorter fics, but now my longer, multi-chapter stories.

**Title** : Sympathy for the Devil

**Author** : E.A. Week

**E-mail** : eaweek at gmail dot com; also on LJ as eaweek.

**Synopsis** : The Doctor is determined to find the meaning of the drums the Master claims to hear in his mind. The truth may be more than either of them had bargained for.

**Category** : _Doctor Who_.

**Distribution** : Feel free to link to this story, but please drop me at least a brief e-mail and let me know you've done this.

**Feedback** : Comments are always welcome! Loved it? Hated it? Leave a review, shoot me an email or a PM and let me know why!

**Disclaimer** : Copyrights to all characters in this story belong to their respective creators, production companies, and studios. I'm just borrowing them, honest!

**Credit where credit is due** : The story title and all chapter titles are shamelessly stolen from the Rolling Stones.

**Story rating** : M for language, sexuality, and adult themes (“R” in movie terms).

**Possible spoilers** : This story is an alternate ending to “Last of the Time Lords,” the final episode in season three of the new _Doctor Who_ series. Major spoilers through the end of season three of _Doctor Who_ and season one of _Torchwood._

Special thanks to **Alipeeps** for the excellent beta-reading and Brit-picking!

Prologue

_Not Fade Away_

Movement caught Martha’s eye, so subtle and stealthy that if she’d blinked at the wrong moment or turned her head the wrong way, she’d have missed it altogether; a year of living on the run, surviving by her wits, had sharpened her senses to an acute degree. The shimmer of red satin; the pale white arm rising slowly, shaky but determined; the black semiautomatic clutched in the manicured hand—

“NO!” With a powerful sideways leap, Martha flung herself at the blonde woman. Chaos followed: the gun exploded, Martha not sure for a moment if anyone had been hit. Then she lay sprawled on the floor, winded, Lucy Saxon’s unconscious form beneath her. The Master’s ersatz wife had struck her head when Martha knocked her over.

The Doctor flew to her side, scooting down to assist his companion.

“Are you all right?”

Martha nodded, still too winded to speak. She just pointed.

The gun had discharged, the bullet harmlessly piercing the hull of the aircraft carrier. Martha could see the small black circle from where she sat.

“She was gonna kill you,” she wheezed when she caught her breath.

“Not me.” The Doctor’s head jerked backwards by a fraction. “ _Him_.”

Martha turned her head and looked. The Master stood staring at Lucy’s prone form, his expression unreadable.

In that instant, they all heard a steady, muffled, mechanical thump, growing louder.

“Doctor, that’s a US military chopper,” called Jack. He hadn’t released his grip on the Master’s arms. “Winter’s assassination was broadcast all over the globe—we’re gonna be up to our ears in commandos any second now.”

“Right!” The Doctor sprang to his feet. “Martha—you deal with them.” He nudged Lucy’s body with his toe. Under his breath, he said, “Make sure she gets medical attention—starting with a psychiatric evaluation.”

“What do I tell the Americans?” asked Martha. “Their president’s a pile of dust—be a little tricky to talk our way out of that one.”

“Improvise!” The Doctor had located a crumpled pile of brown fabric: his long coat. He shrugged into the sleeves, moving at his usual whirlwind pace.

“Where’re you going?” asked Martha.

“We have to get _him_ out of here.”

“He’s a criminal!” Martha was aghast. “He should be punished for everything he’s done—even if nobody but us remembers last year, there were still other people he hurt.”

“What human prison could hold him?” the Doctor inquired, retrieving the jar containing his disembodied hand. “He can mesmerize people by looking at them. You can’t execute him; he’ll just regenerate.” The Doctor searched about the bridge, looking for something.

“You can’t let him go!” Francine burst out.

“I’ll deal with him,” the Doctor insisted.

“Yeah, that worked out really well the last time!” shot Tish.

“Ah!” The Doctor had located the object of his search, choosing for the moment to ignore Tish’s jibe. “Mind your ears, everyone!” Martha realized he’d found the Master’s laser screwdriver. The Doctor pulled out his sonic device and aimed it downward. A loud _BANG_ and a blinding flash of light followed, reducing the Master’s weapon to a smoking, twisted piece of metal.

“Right, I think that takes care of all the loose ends.”

“The chopper’s landing,” called Jack. They all felt the faint vibration as the massive copter touched down on the helipad overhead.

“Doctor, you can’t…” Martha protested.

But he was already sprinting over to Jack and the Master. “I’ll catch you up in a few days!” He ordered Jack, “Back to the TARDIS.” Flanked by the two Time Lords, Jack activated the teleportation device on his wrist. The trio shimmered and vanished, leaving Martha’s last objections stuck in her throat.

“What’re we gonna do now?” wailed Tish.

“All right.” Martha turned to her stunned family. “Look, this is what we’re gonna tell them. Tish, we’ll say he hired you as an aide even though you didn’t have any qualifications—that’s true. Then say he targeted your family and took the rest of us hostage.”

“He accused you of being a terrorist!” Tish pointed out tearfully.

“Right, and there’s no proof of that, so it makes him look even more crazy. Don’t forget, with the Archangel Network disabled, nobody’s gonna believe him anymore. That’s gonna be our story: he took us hostage—we don’t need to know why, he just did. He forced us to watch him assassinate President Winter with some weird high-tech military weapon. We all ducked ‘cos of the blast, and when we looked, he’d vanished.”

“What about Lucy?” asked Clive.

“She had a gun on us, and I knocked her over in self-defense.”

“Good,” Clive nodded. The irony didn’t escape Martha, that her father was regarding her with such pride. As a child, she’d sometimes wondered if he even knew she existed.

“All right, everyone got that?” asked Martha. “Remember—keep it simple. Let me do the talking.” They could hear the sound of voices, the thunder of boots as a platoon of US military personnel approached the bridge. “He was crazy; we were taken hostage; Lucy pulled a gun; Saxon vanished; we don’t know anything.” Lowering her voice, she said, “We’ll probably have the sympathy factor in our favor.”

(ii)

Jack had taken the precaution of locking the TARDIS doors after he’d disabled the Master’s paradox machine, and now he opened the ship again, hustling Earth’s would-be conqueror inside.

“Hold onto him while I scan him,” the Doctor said.

“With pleasure.” Jack tightened his grip on the Master’s arms.

The Time Lord exhaled, making a suggestive noise in his throat. “You’ve done this before,” he purred.

“You have _no_ idea,” Jack snarled.

The Doctor passed the sonic screwdriver up and down his foe’s body, pausing to remove a pin from the Master’s necktie. “Hold out his arm so I can get a look at that wristwatch.”

Jack unfastened the cuffs and raised the Master’s left arm. The Master made no effort to fight him or escape.

“I have every idea, actually,” he drawled. “The question is, does the Doctor?”

“What, know about him?” the Doctor asked. He told Jack, “Now, the right arm.”

While the Doctor scanned the Master’s right arm and hand, the Master went on, “You might think twice about him, Doctor, if you knew the jobs he’s done for the Time Agency. Hit man and torturer, wasn’t it? That last was something of a specialty of his, if I’m not mistaken.”

The truth of his past, revealed so casually to the Doctor, hit Jack like a kick in the gut. The Doctor hadn’t so much as twitched, absorbed in his examination of the Master’s fingers.

“Gallifreyean signet ring?” He tweaked the Master’s cheek. “Getting a bit sentimental, there? Yes, I’m aware of Jack’s past.” The Doctor scooted down to scan the Master’s feet, and he smiled up, serene and benign. “Did you hope to shock me? Sorry, old friend.”

“You—when’d you find out?” Jack wheezed.

“When you first came on board.” Jack couldn’t stop staring, and the Doctor asked, “You really think I’d let you travel in the TARDIS without looking into your past? Yes, I know about your work for the Time Agents.”

“And you still let me…? Why?”

“Because you changed.” The Doctor straightened up. “All right, his shoes are clean. Lock him to one of the supporting posts. No, not that one, the one over there.”

Jack’s mouth opened to form a response, but the Doctor evidently considered the matter closed. Striding to the console, he said, “Let’s get this poor old thing back to normal.”

They worked in silence after that, only speaking when necessary, the Doctor checking the monitor from time to time, scanning the corridor outside the ship. Jack guessed the commandos wouldn’t make it down this far for a while, considering how preoccupied they must be up on the bridge. Not for the first time he wondered exactly what the Doctor’s plans for the Master involved. Surely he didn’t believe he could keep such a dangerous enemy in the TARDIS like a pet?

The Doctor needed only the better part of an hour to dismantle the trappings of the paradox machine and unfuse the ship’s coordinates, tossing unneeded scrap metal out into the corridor. It nonplussed Jack when the Doctor wired his extra hand under the console, but when he did, the control panels lit up, the engines hummed, and the time rotors began to rise and fall in a steady, gentle rhythm.

“You might wanna get rid of that,” Jack murmured under his breath. They stood side-by-side, on the opposite side of the console from the Master.

“Don’t be silly; you never know when you’ll need a spare hand.” The Doctor set a few coordinates, then said, “Hold on to something.”

Jack complied, and the Doctor pulled a lever. With a powerful grinding reverberation, the ship began to dematerialize.

“Yes!” the Doctor laughed, stroking the console with one hand. “Good as ever!”

“Where’re we going?” Jack yelled, but the Doctor pretended not to hear him over the racket. A few moments later, the noise began to subside, the ship shuddered and thumped, and then everything went quiet and still.

“Look outside,” the Doctor suggested.

Jack hurried to the doors, ran outside, and came to an abrupt halt. They’d materialized in Cardiff, in the Millennium Center. Overhead rose the towering waterfall, the liquid cascade splashing down in its usual soothing cadence. People strolled around the square, hurrying to and fro on their business, talking into cell phones, walking dogs, laughing. He felt as though nothing had changed.

“Why here?” he asked. The Doctor had emerged from the TARDIS to stand beside him.

“Well, you might want to contact your team, get them home from Tibet.” The alien grinned, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. “And, no offense, but—” he sniffed the air. “Shower, Jack. Really.”

“What about you?”

“Places to go, things to do,” the Doctor shrugged.

“With him?”

“Yes?”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Doctor—that’s too dangerous. Look how fast he took you down on the _Valiant_. Yeah, I know he’s disarmed, but he’s not powerless.”

“I can take care of myself,” the Doctor huffed.

“Please don’t do this,” Jack begged. “You’re—we just got you back, and Doctor, nothing personal, but he has a very strange effect on you—”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Doctor—”

“Jack. I’ve been dealing with him for a long, long time. Centuries. Trust me when I say I can handle him on my own.”

Realizing he’d never out-argue a stubborn Time Lord, Harkness relented. “Where are you taking him?”

“Someplace special,” the Doctor said. “I still have a lot of questions, and there’s one place I know I can find some answers.”

“But your planet’s destroyed.”

“I’m not talking about Gallifrey.”

Jack sighed. “Suit yourself.” He tapped the Doctor’s chest. “Come back in one piece.”

“I will.”

“I mean it.” Jack winked. “Dobby the House-Elf is _not_ a good look on you, Doctor.” With his thumb and forefinger he indicated a space of one inch. “I was _this_ close to offering you a dirty sock.”

“A thousand unemployed comedians,” the Doctor grumbled. Growing serious, he said, “Take care, Jack. I’ll check in with you in about… about a week’s time, probably.”

“All right. Be careful, Doctor. And good luck.”

The Time Lord vanished back into his ship. The doors closed, and Jack stood there, watching as the blue box faded and vanished, unable to shake a deep sense of foreboding.

Part II

_Under My Thumb_

“Alone at last,” the Master smiled. As he always did in private conversation with the Doctor, he’d switched to the Gallifreyan language. “I’ve never seen you jettison two sidekicks so quickly.”

“Don’t think you can sweet-talk me into unlocking you.” The Doctor pointed his sonic screwdriver at the Master’s chest. “I’ve been patient, and you’ve been _very_ naughty.”

A lewd gleam came into the Master’s eyes. “Sounds like I could use a good spanking, then.”

“Don’t tempt me.” The Doctor buzzed happily about the console, flipping switches and levers, using the toe of his right foot to move a control knob on another panel. The Master sighed loudly with exasperation, rolling his eyes upward.

The time ship groaned and vibrated as it dematerialized, and the Doctor held his breath as it slipped from the twenty-first century Earth timestream. For an instant, the TARDIS vibrated so violently that he thought it would break apart, then it steadied itself as it entered the time vortex. The Doctor exhaled, pleased that the ancient vessel hadn’t been permanently damaged by its months in the Master’s captivity.

The Master had had all he could do to stay upright during the takeoff, and now he got his feet under him again, watching the Doctor, disgruntled less by his captivity than what he likely perceived as the Doctor’s inept handling of the ship. He glared and he scowled and he shook his head, but he said nothing.

“So quiet,” the Doctor remarked, circling the console. “It’s not like you. Not even a token, ‘Curses, foiled again?’”

“So impressed with yourself,” the Master sneered. Then he said, “You know, if you unlocked these cuffs, I could show you how to properly operate this wreck.”

“Nice try.” The Doctor pulled up a piece of the floor grille and dropped down, reconnecting some cables. “It won’t work.”

The Master fell silent again. The Doctor grinned as his sonic screwdriver hummed and glowed, counting in his mind as seconds and minutes passed.

“How’d you infiltrate the Archangel Network?” the Master finally spat out.

“Been driving you mad, hasn’t it?” the Doctor murmured. “Well—madder than usual.” His head popped up above the grating. “You haven’t worked that one out yet, have you?”

“If I had, do you think I’d be asking?” The Master said, “I designed that network myself; I patterned it on my own brainwaves so that I’d know immediately if someone—namely, you—was trying to worm his way into it.”

“And you never felt me, not once, never knew I was there?”

The Master glared, “How could I have missed it? You were always rubbish at telepathy, barely scraped through at the academy.”

The Doctor climbed up and replaced the panel of metal grating. “You allowed me access.”

“I did not!” the Master snarled.

The Doctor pocketed the sonic screwdriver, still smiling. “You did, and you didn’t even realize you were doing it. Because there’s one thing you forgot.”

With another exaggerated eyeroll, the Master sighed, “Enlighten me.”

The Doctor strolled over and draped an arm around the other Time Lord’s shoulder. The Master flinched from the contact.

“You forgot,” he said, “that Time Lords’ telepathic abilities increase with age.”

The Master stared at him, unable to conceal his shock, especially in such close proximity.

“I worked my way into the network, bit by bit, blocking my own thoughts so I wouldn’t trip any psychic alarms. Of course, it helped that you needed a year to get your missiles built. It might’ve tipped my hand if I’d had to act quickly.” He gave the Master’s shoulder a friendly pat before returning to the console. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? Making me weaker only worked against you in the end.”

“You smug prat.”

“I’m not allowed to gloat? You did.”

After another few minutes of stony silence, the Master said, “So, what now?”

“A field trip.”

“To where?”

“Ah, that’s my surprise.”

“You’ve been planning this.”

“Yup.”

“You’ve been planning it all along.”

“And you’re just realizing this now?” The Doctor shook his head, clicking his tongue. “You’re slipping.”

“Since last year?”

“Yes.”

The Master’s face registered many different kinds of disbelief. “You let me capture you.”

“It was the only way to learn what you were up to. I had to get closer.”

“You knew I’d take you prisoner.”

“You’re predictable like that.”

“I could’ve killed you.”

“If I was dead, you couldn’t gloat over your victory.”

“You knew I’d torture you.”

“I’d have been disappointed if you didn’t.”

The Master shook his head. “And people say _I’m_ mad.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

The Master couldn’t argue with that one. Instead, his mouth twisting into a ghoulish rictus, he said, “Did it hurt?”

“What?”

“When I aged and shrank you… did it hurt?”

The Doctor smiled down into the console. Since losing Rose, he’d been throwing himself into one situation of mortal peril after another, flying headlong into excruciating pain with a reckless disregard for his own well-being. Why? To prove that he still lived, still felt? A lyric from an Earth song floated through his mind: _I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel…_ It floated away. He could barely begin to understand this masochistic impulse himself, let alone explain it to someone like the Master.

The other Time Lord watched him, fascinated, waiting for an answer. The Doctor shrugged off the question with irony.

“Clearly you’ve never met Sutekh the Destroyer.”

A few moments passed while the Doctor turned his attention to the console, then he realized the Master hadn’t responded. He looked up, perplexed to see the other Time Lord staring at nothing, his lower jaw slack.

“Or did you?” Nothing about the Master could really surprise him. “Did you try something stupid with him?”

“What?” The Master jolted, looking dazed and startled. “What were you prattling on about?”

Just then the TARDIS began to shiver and vibrate as it emerged from the time vortex, and the Doctor turned his thoughts back to the ship, getting the vessel safely to its destination. He filed away the Master’s odd reaction to mull over later.

With a rumble and a groan, the TARDIS began to materialize. The Doctor checked the monitor—he’d deliberately ordered Jack to lock up the Master so that he wouldn’t be able to see the screen—and gave a small shout of triumph.

“Perfect! Weeell, not quite. Won’t do to be out in the sun like that…” He set a few switches and re-materialized the ship in another location nearby. A look at the monitor confirmed the success of his maneuver.

“Bee-you-tee-ful!” he sang out, racing to open the door. “And here we are.” He used his sonic screwdriver to free the Master from the post, then quickly re-cuffed his adversary. “Out we go, come along.”

With an irritated glare, the Master trudged out of the TARDIS. He stopped short, looking up, awestruck for once in his long life.

Around them stretched a barren desert landscape of orange-red rocks lying scorched beneath the harsh light of an enormous, unforgiving sun. Here and there, the Doctor spotted the twisted husk of a long-dead tree trunk, the dusty bed of a dried-up river.

Directly before the two men stood a vast white tower, perfectly cylindrical in shape, rising so far overhead that it almost seemed to touch the glowing orb of the planet’s moon. For in the afternoon light, the planet’s primary moon was fully visible—the Doctor knew there were three smaller moons, only visible at night. He and the Master stood in the column of shade cast by the tower, protected from the sun’s rays, but not from the heat, which scorched the air around them, searing their lungs.

“How do we get inside?” the Master rasped, “or do we just stand out here and roast to death?”

The Doctor pushed him forward, aiming his sonic screwdriver at the base of the building. A sheath of some glass-like material rose as high as the first level of narrow windows, encircling the tower like a ring on a finger. With a soft grating noise, the ring began to turn, and the outline of a doorway appeared, stopping immediately in front of the two Time Lords. Over the door, a pale green crescent moon was etched into the glass. The doors slid open with a hiss.

“In we go,” the Doctor said, prodding the Master ahead of him.

“You _must_ be joking,” the Master said. “A hospital?”

“The Mestinon Hospital of Haustra,” the Doctor said. “Best mental health facility in the known universe.”

The Master stopped, twisting around to stare back at his nemesis. “So this is your grand plan, then? You’re going to try to cure me?”

“Yes.”

Before the Master could marshal scorn or sarcasm, a tiny creature with vermillion skin approached, legless, rolling along on pseudopodia with wet squishing noises. It emitted a series of chirps, which translated as, “How may I be of service to you?”

“I’m the Doctor, and this is my patient,” the Doctor chirped back. “I’d like him admitted to this facility.”

“Right this way, please. An intake counselor will be with you shortly.”

The spacious lounge area didn’t seem very busy, only a couple of other patients waiting to be admitted. The Doctor kept a close eye on the Master, whose face had begun to take on a panicky expression as the truth of his situation sank in. Elsewhere in the hospital’s vast main lobby, the Doctor spied any number of other species, some humanoid, others not, all waiting to be treated for their various ailments.

A male creature with a curious ruff of bone at the back of his neck approached. “Come with me, please.”

The Doctor prodded the Master to his feet, and they followed the employee into a cubicle.

“Please have a seat. My name is Ondenz, and I’ll be your intake counselor.” He slid behind a desk with an unadorned black surface, but when he put his hands on the desktop, lights began to glow and flash. “Names, please.”

“I’m the Doctor, and this is Professor Yana.”

“Which one of you is the patient?”

“He is.”

Ondenz tapped the desktop. “Could you describe his condition or symptoms?”

“Mania,” the Doctor said, ignoring the Master’s glare. “It’s an acute case.”

“I see he’s restrained. Is he dangerous?”

“Yes, quite dangerous. He’s also a very powerful empath and hypnotist.”

“Our staff are specially selected, impervious to psychic influences. What species is he?”

“Time Lord,” the Doctor said. “We both are.”

The alien’s hands paused on the desktop. “That’s not possible,” he said smoothly. “The Time Lords are extinct.”

“Not quite,” the Doctor said. “We’re the only two survivors.”

“You’ll have to excuse me for a moment.” The counselor twisted around, touched a panel on one wall, and after a moment, he spoke into an intercom. “This is Intake Alpha Five Seven Zed. I have two humanoid males, claiming to be Time Lords. Thank you.”

He turned back. “If you’ll wait a moment, please. There’s certain protocols we need to observe with endangered or extinct species.”

“Lock us up and dissect us, no doubt,” the Master snarled.

The alien seemed shocked. “We never experiment on patients without their consent.” He stood. “You’ll need to come with me,” he said. “To another room. Our director wouldn’t find this space very comfortable, I’m afraid.” He led them out of the cubicle, down a corridor, and through another door. The room they stepped into resembled the intake cubicle except everything in it was easily four times bigger.

A tall door at the back slid open, and in stepped an alien of shocking, magnificent proportions. Even the Doctor, who stood over six feet tall, felt dwarfed. The creature swept toward him, skin gleaming a rich, cobalt blue, eyes pale yellow, the pupils vertical slits, like a cat’s. Its robes, cream-colored with bands of green trim, rustled subtly when it moved.

Ondenz bowed, and said, “Vamana, these are the newcomers I told you about. Gentlemen, may I present Vamana of Ja’faar, the esteemed director of our facility.”

The director’s gaze turned down to the two men. “You are Time Lords?”

“Yes.” The Doctor stared up, finding it an effort to hold this creature’s gaze. She—for she gave off a distinctly female energy—stared at his face, his eyes, like she could see through him. “We’re the last ones.”

The Master piped up. “He destroyed our planet! He conspired with the Daleks to—aaaahhhhh!”

Vamana had stepped forward, putting one hand on the top of his head. She applied barely any pressure, just touching his hair, but the Master reacted as though she’d driven an iron spike through his skull.

“You stink of evil and lies,” she pronounced, her voice rich and mellifluous. She raised her hand and turning to the Doctor. “He is your patient?”

“Yes, he’s in my custody,” the Doctor said, watching as the Master tried to shake off the effects of the alien’s touch. “He’s been mentally ill since childhood, I think. He claims to hear the sound of drums in his mind, and I want to find out what’s behind it.”

“I see. And you are?”

“I’m the Doctor.”

“The Doctor,” she repeated. “ _The_ Doctor?”

“As far as I know, there’s only one of me.”

She touched the top of his head; the Doctor knew better than to fight or to try to hide anything. He felt her presence in his mind like a lovely cascade of cool water; it caused him no pain whatsoever. A moment later, her hand and her presence withdrew.

“You should have announced yourself sooner; I would have come down immediately.” Vamana settled herself in the large chair and gestured for the Time Lords to sit. “You never met me, Doctor, but you spared my planet several centuries ago—it would have been devastated by Silurians if not for your intervention.”

“I did?” the Doctor blinked.

“The planet Ja’faar. Don’t you remember?”

He searched back through the tangled concatenation of memory. “Oh, yes! Ja’faar! That was… that was four or five centuries ago, now. I had Jamie and Zoe with me, then.” He smiled with fond reminiscence. “Good times.”

“You’re still considered a hero among our people, Doctor.”

He blushed. “It was nothing.”

“It wasn’t ‘nothing’ to us.” She said, “Whatever services this hospital can offer are at your disposal.”

“Thank you, then. It shouldn’t take too long and won’t require anything complicated. We’ll need some kind of accommodations, I suppose.”

“Yes, of course. We’ll prepare a room for you right away. Come with me.”

They followed her to the back of the room, through the tall doors, which opened into a lift. The Master said nothing, staring down at his feet in stony silence while the Doctor made cheery small talk with Vamana.

“Lovely place you’ve got here. How long have you been director?”

“A decade. I’ve served here nearly my entire life—first as an attendant, than as a physician, and now as director.”

The lift took them up—and up—and up—until finally they emerged on floor 327.

“There are eight floors above this one,” Vamana said, strolling out into a corridor whose high ceilings had been installed to accommodate her height. “Floor 335 is a greenhouse and an observatory. If you have time, you should go up there—the views are magnificent.”

“Thanks, I might just do that.”

She led them to a door marked 327-Gamma-2. “I hope you’ll find this comfortable.”

The room proved spacious and plain: two beds, a table and chairs, tinted windows overlooking the landscape to the hospital’s southwest. Vamana’s blue head brushed the ceiling, seven and a half feet up.

“Splendid,” the Doctor pronounced. The moment he stepped inside, he felt a peculiar sense of amplification in his mind, as if the volume of his thoughts had become louder. From the twitch of the Master’s shoulders, he’d noticed it, too.

“Where’s the telly?” he sulked. Vamana stared at him, blank and impassive.

“There isn’t one,” the Doctor said. He asked Vamana, “Do you have any kind of entertainment network?”

“Noise is too distracting to our patients. There’s a library on the first level.”

“Books?” the Master sneered. “How antiquated.” He faltered under Vamana’s cat-like gaze and fell silent.

The Doctor used the sonic screwdriver to unlock the Master’s cuffs, and Vamana handed him a set of clothes: a pale green tunic and trousers, plain sandals. “You can shower in there.” She opened a narrow door in another wall. “Put your own things there. Doctor, there’s another cupboard for you.” She gave him an identical tunic and trousers in pale blue. “Green is for patients, blue for their advocates.”

“I had a shower this morning,” the Master complained.

“Standard hospital procedure,” the Doctor said. “Be glad they didn’t douse us in the lift. Go on.”

The bathroom door slid open, and the Master vanished inside, scowling. The Doctor waited until he heard water running, then gestured Vamana into the corridor outside.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “His mind is broken with rage and hatred, and much of that is directed against you.”

“I have to at least try. He’s the only other one of my species left alive. I have to help him.”

“As you wish. What treatment were you planning?”

The Doctor quickly sketched out his ideas. Vamana nodded, looking thoughtful. “I can’t do it on my own,” he explained, “he’s so powerful, he’d just take me over. I couldn’t fight him. That’s why I need someone like you there.”

“Of course. But Doctor—you may not like what you find. Or you may not find anything at all. What then?”

“I have contingency plans.”

She nodded again, letting the matter drop. “When do you wish to start?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“All right. I’ll see to it everything is ready.”

“Good.” The Doctor glanced around. “Is this a secure area?”

“Every floor is. You need a special password to open the doors or use the lifts, and there’s a retinal scan, too.”

“Good. The Master can mesmerize with his voice. Are your staff prepared to deal with that?”

“Psychic immunity is a requirement of employment.”

“Good.” The Doctor fished into his pockets, producing his TARDIS key, the sonic screwdriver, psychic paper, and the handcuffs he’d used to restrain the Master. “Keep these for me until I’m ready to leave.” He tapped his head. “And before you let me leave the building, make sure it’s really me in here, would you?”

Her mouth formed a smile. “Yes.” His effects vanished into a pocket of her cream-colored robe.

“I should get back inside.”

She followed him into the room. A few moments later, the Master emerged, clad in the green hospital uniform, his hair damp from the shower. Divested of his habitual black, he appeared smaller, strangely naked and vulnerable. Without speaking either to the Doctor or Vamana, he went to his cupboard and began to arrange his clothes inside, hanging up the trousers, jacket, and shirt with fastidious neatness.

The Doctor tossed aside his long coat and jacket, removed his tie, and kicked off his trainers. Leaving the clothes on one of the beds, he went into the bathroom, the door sliding shut behind him. The bathroom had been tiled in a soothing pattern of pale gray and pink, the toilet small and efficient, the sink a white basin protruding from the wall in a nearly flat arc. There was no tub, only a walk-in shower with no visible fixtures, and the one mirror had been set flush into the wall, covered with a clear sheet of unbreakable plastic. The bathroom was as suicide-proof as a room could possibly be.

Satisfied, the Doctor finished disrobing and stepped into the shower stall. Water sprayed out from all sides, perfectly adjusted to his body temperature. It was the Doctor’s first shower in over a year, and he laughed with the sheer pleasure of water running down his skin. As he lathered up, he broke into a spontaneous chorus of “Singin’ in the Rain.” After he rinsed, jets of warm air puffed out to dry him. The hospital provided only the smallest of hand towels—too little fabric to be used as a noose—which the Doctor used to pat off the excess water and rub his hair. The pale blue hospital uniform, made of some synthetic fabric, caressed his skin like an exotic blend of microfiber and silk.

Out in the room, the Master stood staring out the window at the desert below; from the clench of his jaw, the Doctor surmised he was grinding his teeth to powder. The Doctor scooped up his clothes and dumped them in a ball the bottom of his cupboard.

“All right?” asked Vamana.

“Everything’s lovely.”

“Would you like something to eat?”

“Yes, please.”

“I’ll have something sent up.” She nodded toward a nearby intercom button. “You can use that if you require assistance.”

“Thank you. For everything.”

She slipped out, and the Doctor flopped onto the bed nearest the door, folding his hands beneath the back of his head. He crossed his right leg across his left knee, admiring his foot. He liked his feet in this incarnation—slender and well-shaped, with strong, high arches and long toes.

“It’s too loud.” The Master didn’t turn around as he spoke, and the Doctor knew he wasn’t referring to external noise.

“The rooms are designed with psychic shielding. I imagine they don’t want patients interfering with each other’s thoughts.”

The Master clutched his temples, rocking himself back and forth, his face contorted with pain. The Doctor watched, concerned and sympathetic, realizing that the Master’s drumming was going to seem a lot louder in here.

The spasm passed, and the Master relaxed, sagging against the window so that his breath fogged the heavy glass.

“What are you planning?”

“You’ll find out tomorrow.”

“What if I don’t go along with it? What if I refuse?”

“Don’t you want that drumming to stop?”

The Master turned around, staring at his old foe. “That’s your game? The drumming? You think if that stops, everything will be fine, and we can skip out of here hand-in-hand, singing ‘Kumbayah?’”

“It’s a place to start.”

“I don’t need your help, Doctor! I don’t need you to heal me.”

“That drumming isn’t normal,” the Doctor stated. “I’ve never heard drums in my head, and no other Time Lord I ever knew said they experienced anything like it. You’re the only one, and I want to know why you hear it.”

The Master folded his arms, stubborn. “And if I refuse?”

“You won’t at least try?”

The Master gave him a pointed glare.

The Doctor sat up. “All right, then.” He hopped off the bed. “Come here.”

“What?”

The Doctor stood in the doorway to the bathroom. The Master immediately grew suspicious, and the Doctor said, “Oh, come, do you think I’d go through all this effort if I planned to drown you in the toilet? I could’ve done that back on the _Valiant_ if I’d wanted.”

At last the Master trudged across the floor and into the bathroom. The lights blinked on. The Doctor said, “Look in the mirror. What do you see?”

“Apart from two pathetic-looking Time Lords? Nothing.”

“Right. Now, close your eyes.”

The Master gave him another wary look, and the Doctor sighed, exasperated. They stood glaring at each other, but at last the Master’s curiosity got the better of him, and he shut his eyes.

The Doctor closed his eyes also, reaching back into his mind, into that black place of ice-cold rage, a place he didn’t like to acknowledge existed, but which he’d been touching all too often lately. Beside him, the Master let out a quiet, almost erotic gasp. He could sense the Doctor’s dark power, and it stirred him.

“Now, look.”

The Doctor opened his eyes. His own reflection stared back at him, his hair wild, his pupils so dilated that the brown of his irises was swallowed up in a pool of black, his eyes like twin disks of obsidian. The Master turned, staring first at the Doctor, then at the Doctor’s reflection, his breathing more audible. Then he gave some consideration to the third figure reflected in the mirror.

“Who is she?” he asked, peering closer for a better look. “Is she human?”

“She was an Earth child in the early twentieth century, before an alien stole her body and turned her into a monster. In life, her name was Lucy Cartwright.”

The Master studied the girl. “It’s not an illusion. She’s _in_ the mirror. Trapped there.”

“Not just this mirror,” the Doctor said. “Every mirror, everywhere.”

“That’s brilliant,” the Master breathed. Then he stiffened. “Lucy used to see her sometimes, on the _Valiant_. She’d tell me she kept seeing a little girl with a red balloon, out of the corner of her eye.” He rounded on his adversary. “You were making her see the girl.”

“Keeping myself amused, yes.”

“You’re a sick fuck, did you know that?”

“I learned from the Master.”

The Master had caught the alien’s attention, and now she lunged for him, her face hideous, contorted, only stopping when she collided with the boundary of her prison.

The Master jolted back, an involuntary reflex. “She can feel me.”

“She knows you’re a Time Lord. If she got free, she’d try to steal your essence to prolong her life indefinitely.”

“She’s an Aubertide,” the Master realized. “We learned about them in the academy when we studied parasitic species.” He turned to the Doctor. “Aubertides are short-lived insects. Is that what she did to you—tried to hijack your remaining regenerations?”

The Doctor didn’t answer. He just watched his prisoner.

“So you created a tiny dimensional oubliette and trapped her there, allowing her to see out onto any point in space and time you choose. She can only see, she can’t touch or escape or experience anything… she can only watch. Endless psychological torment.” The Master regarded the Doctor with admiring eyes. “You surprise me. I’d never have given you credit for something so deliciously cruel.”

“Cruel?” A ghost of a smile touched the Doctor’s face. “This isn’t cruel.” He snapped his fingers, and the girl vanished, leaving only the reflection of the two Time Lords. “You should see what I did to the rest of her family.” He turned on his heel and left the bathroom.

The Master followed him out. “What’d they do to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you. You don’t punish anyone like that, not even me. They must’ve done something to offend you on some personal level. Something to do with Miss Tyler, I assume.”

“Rose was out of the picture by then.” The Doctor flopped down onto his bed. “Are you keeping a tally of how I deal with my adversaries? I should be flattered. Next thing I know, you’ll be starting a fan club.”

The Master sat on the edge of the bed opposite. “I’ve been tracking your activities since you sent me back to Earth. The lovely thing about infiltrating a government is gaining access to all its surveillance. You’re considered a ‘person of interest’ in many parts of Earth, England in particular.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” the Doctor yawned.

The Master leaned forward. “Taking down an entire government, Doctor? Really, now, don’t you think that’s a bit extreme? Over the Sycorax debacle? Poor Harriet Jones. Poor England, denied its Golden Age. If she’d been in office, it mightn’t have been so easy for me to take power.”

“Like you couldn’t have had her assassinated in a heartbeat?” the Doctor scoffed. “Blaming me for it, no doubt, and setting up yourself as the country’s savior in the aftermath of tragedy. Or discredit her and run her out of office. That’d be child’s play for you, barely another hoop to jump through.”

“You must’ve lost your hand in a fight with the Sycorax.”

“Big swordfight,” the Doctor agreed. He waved his new hand at the Master. “Hello!”

“I examined the tissue. You’d only just regenerated, or else the hand wouldn’t have grown back.”

“Lucky me!” The Doctor waved again. “Hello!”

“Do stop.” The Master made a face. “So, let me guess: you took out the Sycorax leader in one-on-one combat and sent the rest of them packing. According to the UNIT reports, they’d used blood control to hypnotize a third of Earth’s population and were threatening to have them all commit suicide if Harriet didn’t surrender the planet.”

“Everyone with A+ blood. Cheap voodoo. They would’ve intimidated and bullied the population into surrendering without raising a single weapon.”

“And when the Sycorax ship was on its way out of Earth’s atmosphere, she authorized Torchwood One to shoot it down.” The Master’s voice grew soft, mocking. “And you didn’t like that, because you’d already averted the crisis in a way that minimized bloodshed on both sides. She wasn’t willing to play by your rules, so you cut her throat politically.”

“That’s not the reason.”

“You got up on your high horse of morality over the _Sycorax_? Those scavengers?”

“Nope.”

“Was it over Torchwood, then?”

“Getting warmer,” the Doctor allowed.

“I toured their facility at Canary Wharf,” the Master said. “Every alien artifact they’d ever collected had been disabled or destroyed—your work?”

“In case some other group of would-be imperialists got the same idea. I’m sure you’ve read up on Torchwood. They weren’t collecting all that stuff for the benefit of humanity. They were planning to use the technological advances to build a new British Empire.”

“So you took down Harriet Jones because she was in league with a bunch of prats who wouldn’t let the rest of the world play with their toys?”

“Driving you mad, isn’t it?” the Doctor laughed. “Can’t figure out my motivations; that’s a new one for you.”

The Master folded his arms. “Humor me.”

The Doctor sat up and faced him. “She authorized Torchwood to destroy the Sycorax ship without a full understanding of the weapon they were using. The most powerful weapons tech in the history of humanity—developed from an alien ship Torchwood pillaged—and she used it to shoot down a gang of scavengers who’d not only been defeated but were never much of a threat to begin with.”

“You didn’t like her making a pre-emptive strike. Ah, so she didn’t share your pacifist ways. That’s it.”

“She didn’t consider the political consequences,” the Doctor said. “How would the rest of the world react once it knew England possessed a laser cannon that could blow anything into dust? And don’t get me started on the environmental impact—if the ship’d blown up any closer to Earth, there would’ve been huge chunks of burning rock falling on populated areas. As it was, we had ash raining out of the sky practically all night. For all she knew, the Sycorax ship might’ve been a giant slab of asbestos, or there might’ve been a nuclear reactor on board. She authorized that strike without any understanding of either the weapon she was using or the target she was aiming for.”

“And you punished her for her ignorance. Or was it her hubris?”

The Doctor scowled, “She had options. It’s not like her back was against the wall and she had no other choices.” _Not like me_ , he added silently, _with Gallifrey_.

“You punished her for bad judgment?”

“It wasn’t her ignorance or her bad judgment,” the Doctor revealed. “She took the two worst lines of defense you can ever take with me. She said she shot down the ship on behalf of the people who’d elected her.”

The Master laughed, delighted. “In other words, she was just doing her job?”

“And then she said Britain’s Golden Age ‘comes with a price.’”

“The ends justify the means.” The Master made a soft tsking noise. “Harriet, Harriet. Didn’t she realize that when you beg the Doctor for help, you play on his terms?”

“Begged me for help?”

“She got on telly and begged you to help her. I saw the tape.”

“I never knew that.” The Doctor swung around and lay prone on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “It must’ve been while I was unconscious—post regeneration trauma.”

“Would it have made a difference?”

“None. She showed no respect for my moral beliefs. That wasn’t the first time I’d helped her. She knew me well enough to know what she was doing wouldn’t sit well with me, and she went ahead and did it anyway. And you know, she blamed me for the whole debacle afterwards? Called me an alien threat, even.”

“Insult to injury. And I suppose you think all that justifies taking a major political figure out of power? Even if the country’s government fell into chaos afterwards.”

“How many centuries has England existed as a political entity?” the Doctor countered. “How much war and upheaval and violence have they endured? If they can survive all that, they can survive the ousting of one trigger-happy politician.”

“And that’s how you justified it to yourself?”

“Don’t expect me to shed any tears of pity over Harriet Jones, and don’t think you can lay a guilt trip on me over it. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change anything—especially now that I know she’d been begging me to help her.” The Doctor’s mouth closed in a hard, unforgiving line.

The Master began to speak, but the Doctor interrupted him. “You shot down the Racnoss mother ship a year later, so look who’s talking.”

“You drowned her children, though, didn’t you? Drained the Thames. Bloody mess on our hands afterwards. I knew it had to be you—your fingerprints were all over it.”

“Like you would’ve let the Racnoss live. A bunch of giant spiders, interfering with your plans for global domination? I doubt it.”

Before the Master could reply, they heard a soft ping from outside the room: the announcement of a visitor. The Doctor hopped up off the bed to answer the summons. In the corridor outside stood a trio of hospital workers with an elaborate cart.

“Ah, dinner,” the Doctor said, stepping aside to let them enter. “Good—I’m starving.”

**To be continued...**


	2. Sympathy for the Devil--Part Two

Part II

_19 th Nervous Breakdown_

The three workers departed, and the Doctor dropped into one of the seats, surveying the food on the table, a colorful medley of fruits and vegetables. There was a steaming dish of stew made from grains and legumes. A loaf of bread, smelling fresh from the oven, made his mouth water, and he broke off a piece for himself.

“You really should try some of this,” he said, poking among the dishes and sampling the flavorful fare. “It’s delicious.”

The Master said nothing, still standing at the window, staring down into the desert, his posture and expression sullen. The Doctor watched him, assessing his behavior with a scientist’s eyes. He had no wish to harm or humiliate the Master, but he did think it was important for the other Time Lord to be pushed out of his comfort zone and into a situation where he had no power.

“Suit yourself,” the Doctor shrugged. “I might eat the lot, though.”

He ignored his old foe for a bit, enjoying the meal. During his year on the _Valiant_ , he’d barely eaten anything. His shrunken old stomach couldn’t tolerate much anyway, and by reducing his food intake to an absolute minimum, he’d also reduced his need for awkward and bothersome trips to the bathroom. Fasting had helped keep his mind clear for his crucial telepathic infiltration of the Archangel Network. Most important, he’d been able to give his meager portions to the Joneses, whose young, healthy bodies had had far greater need for sustenance. He knew they’d suffered from hunger, and he’d done what he could to alleviate their misery; as a Time Lord, the Doctor could slow his metabolism, so he hadn’t experienced much in the way of hunger pangs.

Now that his health was restored, there was no need to hold his appetite at bay, and the Doctor consumed everything in front of him with gluttonous abandon.

The Master slouched over to the table, examining the food offerings with an expression of disdain.

“Rabbit food,” he scoffed. Using one of the small, plastic spoons, he sampled the stew. “There’s no meat in it.”

“You really think they could keep livestock on a planet like this?” the Doctor said. “They probably have all they can do to irrigate their crops.”

The Master stared at him. The Doctor could see wheels turning behind the hazel eyes.

“They have patients from all over the universe here, all species.”

“Yes.”

“Including some that must be obligatory carnivores. They can’t synthesize protein from this… this offal.” His gaze bored into the Doctor’s. “They must import meat from somewhere.”

The Doctor regretted that the Master had always been so good at logic, even if his application of it was often faulty.

“You told that blue hulk not to feed us any animal products.”

“I only—”

“They kept us on a vegan diet at the academy when we were learning telepathy.” The Master’s scowl deepened into a black look of anger. “To clear our minds.”

The Doctor didn’t deny this.

“You’re going to read me.”

The Doctor munched on a carrot-like vegetable. “You really should try to eat something.”

In a moment of uncontrolled fury, the Master grabbed the nearest dish and flung it at the Doctor, who snatched it out of midair without spilling its contents.

“Time Lord reflexes,” he said, setting the dish on the table. “I have them, too.”

“What are you planning?” Anxiety mingled with the Master’s rage.

Without allowing either his calm or his compassion to falter, the Doctor said, “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

“You didn’t answer—” The Master clutched his head, reeling away from the table. He dropped to his knees, doubled over, wheezing in pain. When the fit passed, he sat gasping, still holding his head in his hands.

“You can’t possibly believe that anything I’d do to you is worse than what you’re experiencing right now.”

“I won’t let you,” the Master said, his face stubborn and set.

The Doctor didn’t respond to that, eating slowly and deliberately.

“And if I don’t cooperate, you’ll put me in one of your traps for all eternity?”

The Doctor said, “It’s up to you to decide that fate for yourself.”

After a pace, the Master returned to the table, ate a crust of bread, and flopped out on his bed, sulking; he’d had his fill of argument for now. The Doctor finished his meal, concerned, wondering at the wisdom of his plan and the potential consequences if it failed. In a way, the possible consequences of success worried him even more.

(ii)

Night fell quickly in the desert, no slow, lingering twilight, just an abrupt shift from dazzling light to inky blackness. Haustra had few inhabited population centers, none of them anywhere near the hospital, and no glow of artificial light illuminated the sky. Overhead floated the pale moon, casting only a fitful glow into the desert.

The lights in the room could be dimmed but not darkened completely. The Doctor eased himself between the sheets, luxuriating in the comfort of the bed, a blissful treat after a year of sleeping in a dog tent. He wiggled against the mattress, stretching from fingertips to toetips, and with a sigh, shut down his conscious thoughts, entering a trance-like meditative state.

This ability had proven both a useful tool and a sanity-saver on the _Valiant_ ; now it allowed his body to rest while keeping his senses alert. True sleep would make him too vulnerable to the Master. Instead, his mind soared out among the stars, then back into the planet itself, feeling its dense inner core, its great age, the gravitational pull of its moons and sun.

Some time later, he became aware of furtive, mouse-like noises. Without opening his eyes, he said, “I gave the lot to Vamana—the key, the sonic screwdriver, everything. There’s probably a banana in there somewhere, if you’re hungry.”

He heard the door to his cupboard close, then more mouse noises, then the sound of the Master creeping back into his bed.

A few hours after that, the Doctor came back to himself again, his limbic system warning him of immanent danger. Ascertaining the cause instantly, he sat bolt upright, catching in his two hands the pillow that was about to smother him.

“Do I look _stupid_?” he said in a low voice. He gave a little shove, and the Master staggered back a couple of steps. The Doctor barked, “Get back to bed, now!”

The Master scurried away and stayed in his bed until dawn.

At daybreak, it became clear the Master hadn’t slept all night, perhaps due to the drumming, though the Doctor knew his old foe could also have put himself into a trance. The other Time Lord lay on top of the bed, rather than beneath the covers, arms folded under his head, his expression sullen, feet blue with cold; the desert night had been chilly. The Doctor ignored him and went in to wash.

The door chimes announced the arrival of a visitor: a small creature with pale, fairly reptilian skin. It pushed a small cart of towels, bottles of lotion, and grooming instruments.

“Your biodata indicates you are male mammals,” the alien said. “Would you like your facial hair shaved, or do you prefer a full-body waxing?”

The Master exploded into one of his rages. “I am not a mammal!” he thundered, leaping off the bed. “I’m a Time Lord, you grotesque albino lizard!”

The Doctor caught him by the shoulders, shoving him down into a chair.

“Professor Yana would appreciate a shave,” he said.

The alien hadn’t even blinked in the face of the Master’s outburst; in such a large mental hospital, he’d probably witnessed far worse. He draped a towel across the Master’s shoulders and used a slender electric razor to trim away the light brown stubble on the Time Lord’s jaw.

“Lovely,” the Doctor pronounced, watching the barber brush the Master’s hair. “I must say, losing that goatee is a definite improvement.”

The Master shot him a withering look as the alien barber whipped away the towel.

“Say ‘thank you,’” the Doctor ordered.

“Thank you,” the Master mumbled down into his lap.

“Now tell him you’re sorry.”

The Master’s ears had turned the deep red of beets, and after a few moments’ struggle with his pride, he managed a grudging, barely audible, “M sorry.”

“Thank you,” the Doctor said. “That’s better.”

The Master bolted up, seething, and went to his now-habitual spot at the window. The Doctor dropped into the chair, and the barber draped him with a fresh towel. The razor buzzed and tickled across his face, such a pleasant sensation that the Doctor asked for his sideburns to be trimmed, and after a brief consultation, the barber used a smaller implement to prune back the Doctor’s excess ear and nose hair, as well as the wild shrubs of his eyebrows. For some unknown reason, this incarnation had turned out ridiculously hirsute. The Doctor thanked the barber with a smile, and the alien went on his way.

The food service people followed, bringing in fresh fruit and steaming porridge and more warm bread. An earthenware pot of tea accompanied the meal, herbal and tangy and sweet. The Doctor ate sparingly, not wanting to overload his system for the task that lay ahead.

“You should have something,” he told the Master.

“Swill,” the Master scowled.

“This porridge is quite tasty,” the Doctor said, licking his spoon. “Earthy and nutty and crunchy. Lowers cholesterol and keeps you regular, all at the same time.”

“You think you’re so damned funny.”

“Well, I try.” Growing more serious, the Doctor said, “At least have some tea.”

“I’m used to having coffee and croissants and bacon for breakfast.”

“Sorry, not on the menu any more. We’re under new management.”

They heard a soft ping, and the door to the room opened. Vamana stood there, blue and magnificent.

“Doctor, everything is ready,” she announced.

“Splendid, we’ll get started,” the Doctor said, standing. The Master didn’t budge from his spot at the window. His skin had gone sickly white. The Doctor went and stood beside him.

“I’d rather you walk out of here on your own steam,” the Doctor said softly. “It’s a lot more dignified than having Vamana call in a team to hog-tie you.” He took the Master’s arm and steered him toward the door. The Master didn’t fight; he trudged along, body rigid.

Only staff were about at this hour; the Doctor didn’t see any patients. Vamana led them to the lift and down three floors. This level seemed not to have any patient rooms; he spotted examination rooms and surgical suites—a clinical area, rather than residential.

Vamana stopped at a door and ushered the two Time Lords inside. The Master took one look and let out a high-pitched scream of pure terror. He twisted and tried to bolt, but the Doctor grabbed onto him and held fast; the Master kicked and bucked, but the Doctor wouldn’t let go, not until Vamana had closed the door and secured it.

“Don’t… please don’t!” The Master was gabbling and sobbing, pummeling the Doctor with his fists. Even given the centuries of conflict between them, this reaction distressed the Doctor deeply. Something in the benign room had frightened the Master on a visceral level—could it be the syringe that lay on the instrument tray?

“Stop it!” the Doctor grunted, trying to push the Master over toward the examining chair. “I only want to help you—I can’t do that if you keep fighting like this!”

Vamana intervened then, lifting the Master off his feet and depositing him into the seat.

“Shall I restrain him?” she inquired.

The long reclining chair had belts that could be used to hold difficult patients immobile, but the Doctor knew by instinct that this would be the wrong approach to take.

“No!” he said, pulling up another chair, so that he sat beside the Master, facing him. “No, I’m not going to strap you down!”

“Why not?” the Master snarled. “You’ve dragged me halfway across the galaxy and forced me into this hospital; why stop there, Doctor? Why pretend I have any free will? Is it just to salve your own miserable conscience?”

“Listen to me!” the Doctor insisted. “For once in your life, just _listen_! That drumming—it’s getting worse, isn’t it?”

The Master stared at him.

“It’s getting worse and worse, and sooner or later you’re going to kill yourself to escape it. Is that what you want?”

The Master wheezed, “What’s in that syringe?” His gaze darted fearfully to the tray.

“It’s a muscle relaxant and a time-released sedative,” the Doctor said. “It’s so I can read you without you fighting or trying to take control of me. I’m not daft enough to try it on my own. That’s why I brought you to the Mestinon Hospital; it’s a controlled environment.”

The Master still looked incredulous.

“It’s not a truth serum or a poison or anything that could hurt you. I need you to relax so I can look inside your mind and see what causes that drumming.” He took the Master’s hands and squeezed them, shocked at how clammy they felt. The Master was sweating, wet stains darkening his pale green tunic, and the Doctor could smell adrenaline, bitter and acrid.

“I want to help you,” the Doctor said. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted. But I won’t do this without your consent.”

The Master glared at him, his body still tense, refusing to grant permission.

Vamana turned to the Doctor, waiting on his orders. He’d endured so much to reach this point; he knew they could force treatment on the Master, but to him, that was antithetical to the very notion of medicine, of healing. He wanted the Master to participate in the process of his own volition.

Moments ticked past, and the Master still refused to acquiesce. Having exhausted all reasonable arguments, the Doctor ran through a catalog of his foe’s weaknesses, things that he found difficult to resist.

He still held the Master’s hands in his own, and now he raised them to his face, kissing the fingers and pressing the clammy palms against his cheek. Ducking his head, he pleaded in a small voice, “Master, please let me help you.”

The submissiveness did the trick. The Master relaxed, sighing, an expression of pleasure flitting across his features. His gaze settled on the Doctor, hungry and covetous. He didn’t quite nod, but he inclined his chin slightly.

Without waiting for further objections, the Doctor rolled up the right sleeve of the Master’s tunic, sterilized a small patch of skin, and injected the drug into a vein, as gently as possible. Then he sat with the Master’s hand in his, waiting for the narcotic to do its work.

“It’ll be all right,” he murmured, watching the Master’s pupils dilate. “I’ll be in there with you—if there’s anything to be afraid of, you won’t have to face it alone.”

The Master’s mouth turned up in a smirk. “Such a comforting jailer.”

“Stop that,” the Doctor said, as if scolding a child. He checked the Master’s pulses, finding them slow and steady. The eyes had dilated into wide circles, disconcertingly green and limpid.

The Doctor focused his own power for a moment, then imagined a series of steel doors swinging shut, locking away his memories in a place the Master couldn’t reach them. The Master had been correct about one thing: the Doctor had always been an indifferent student of telepathy, reading the minds of others only with great reluctance. However, in another twist of irony, the year of confinement had considerably sharpened the Doctor’s telepathic skills, enabling him to walk through his rival’s mind with much less risk to himself.

“Shh,” he murmured, placing his slim fingertips on either side of the Master’s ears, finding the contact points. He had perhaps thirty minutes before the sedative took complete effect and the Master fell asleep. The Master closed his eyes. A brief burst of static, and then the Doctor was standing inside the tortured landscape of the other Time Lord’s mind.

(iii)

The drumming nearly assaulted him: a booming, crashing echo that came from everywhere and nowhere. The tempo varied, but the essential rhythm never changed: rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, over and over and over. There were bass drums pounding out this rhythm, tom-toms, snare drums, war drums, robotic synthesized disco drums, some beating out the rhythm blindingly fast, others at a funeral pace, discordant as a traffic jam in an enormous city, a wretched, deafening cacophony of unbearable noise. If chaos itself had a soundtrack, this is what it would sound like.

The Doctor broke off contact and opened his eyes, staring down at the Master’s face.

“This is what you hear? All the time?”

Smiling through his drugged stupor, the Master said, “Ah, so he believes me now.”

“I never doubted you heard _some_ thing, but that’s… that’s horrific.” _No wonder he’s mad_ , the Doctor thought. That would be enough to drive even the most reasonable being into gibbering insanity; that the Master had survived so long while retaining any semblance of rational thought was a testament to his willpower. The Doctor regarded his adversary with something close to awe.

Aware of the time, the Doctor once again put his fingertips on the Master’s temples and entered the Time Lord’s thoughts.

Other than the drums, the most remarkable thing about the Master’s mind was his extraordinary intelligence, his ruthless cunning, and the energy that drove his thoughts at warp speed. The Doctor felt also his anger, a boiling rage that had no identifiable cause. The anger worked hand-in-hand with the Master’s hatred and sense of superiority; most of the things in which he took pleasure were either childlike—candy, Earth popular culture—or sadistic. The Master’s treatment of Lucy Saxon was appalling, even though the Doctor already knew about it. He found it disturbing—and yet also, in a twisted way, rather flattering—how much he himself figured in the Master’s thoughts; the word _obsession_ barely began to describe that hydra-headed monster of loathing and thwarted lust. But over-riding even those two emotions was fear—in fact, it startled the Doctor just how much his nemesis feared him.

Taking a deep breath to steady himself, the Doctor plunged into the Master’s memories, flicking past their arrival at the hospital, the journey in the TARDIS, the Master’s defeat, the year on the _Valiant_ , the eighteen months the Master had spent on Earth before the Doctor had caught up with him. He watched the Master’s meteoric rise to power, his extravagant marriage to Lucy, and further back, the couple’s first meeting: the Master crash-landing the TARDIS in Lucy’s garden, staggering out, still dressed in Yana’s clothing, hair and eyes wild, collapsing in her astonished arms.

The Doctor wheeled back further, to the Master’s human existence on Melcassairo, his flight from doomed Gallifrey, his resurrection by a small, renegade band of Time Lords. Back, back, back. The Doctor saw once again his confrontation with the Master in San Francisco; he felt bullets tearing through him; he saw himself in his seventh incarnation, fetching the Master’s remains from Skaro. He saw his confrontation with the Master on the planet of the Cheetah People; he saw them together with the Rani; he stood watching as the Master burned alive on Sarn; he saw the destruction of Traken and the Master’s rebirth; he saw the Master as a skeletal, decrepit wreck on Gallifrey; he watched the Master race through his initial thirteen bodies. He saw himself in his third body, stranded on Earth. Familiar, beloved faces flicked past: Jo Grant, the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, other UNIT personnel, most of them now dead.

At last he reached the point he sought: the Master’s very first incarnation. He flashed past the violent death in a laboratory accident, went back to the Master’s young adulthood, his adolescence, and finally, his childhood.

When the flickering images stopped, the Doctor experienced a few moments of dizzy exhaustion, limbs trembling: reading a mind always took effort, and the Master’s was especially complex. Here, the drums sounded muffled, distant. He was on Gallifrey, outside the Citadel at night, ceremonial torches burning, watching as a small black-haired child stared into the untempered schism.

“Master?” he called.

The child turned and gazed curiously up at the Doctor. He didn’t recognize the title.

Exhaling, the Doctor approached the boy and inquired, “Koschei?” He hadn’t spoken that name for centuries.

The boy responded, “Who are you?”

The Doctor scooted down so that they could look eye to eye. “Do you know me?”

After a moment, the child said, “I think I do. Are you the Doctor?”

The Time Lord smiled, weary. “Yes, that’s me? Is it here, where it started? The drumming?”

Baffled, the boy said, “What drumming?”

“ _That_ drumming. Can’t you just hear it, now?”

Koschei tipped his head, focusing as he listened. He clutched the sleeve of the Doctor’s coat, eyes big and anxious.

“Where does it come from? Do you know?” the Doctor asked.

The little boy gulped, shaking his head.

“When did it start? When did you start hearing it?”

Koschei hid his face in the Doctor’s shoulder. “I’m scared,” he whimpered.

“Shh, it’s all right.” The Doctor put his arms around the child, pulling him close. “It’s all right—I’m here now. You can tell me. When did it start? Do you remember?”

The head shook.

“These are your memories. You must know.”

“I don’t.”

“Come here.” The Doctor steered the boy back to the schism. “Now, look. Tell me what you see.”

The boy let go of the Doctor and gazed into the time vortex. Its indescribable light shone into his face, turning his blue eyes into deep violet wells.

“Everything,” Koschei breathed. “I see everything.”

“And it doesn’t frighten you?”

“No.” The boy glanced at the Doctor, surprised. “Why should I be afraid?”

The Doctor stared at him, but Koschei was too young, too transparent. He watched the lad look into the vortex, smiling, enchanted.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “Yes, it is. Now, when I was your age, I was so frightened by it I ran away. But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“How does it make you feel?” The Doctor tapped his head. “Inside, in here.”

Koschei smiled, that wonderful radiant smile the Doctor couldn’t remember without his chest hurting. “Happy.”

“It makes you happy? Why?”

“Because everything is in there, and it’s perfect. It sings.”

“It sings? You can hear the universe singing?”

“Can’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ve always heard it.”

The Doctor remembered too well the time he’d mentioned this to the Master, when they were both young adults, still on Gallifrey. The Master had regarded his friend with scorn and said, “You’re such a romantic idiot.” When the Doctor had pressed, the Master had insisted he’d never heard the universe singing; in fact, he’d grown angry and frightened and had stormed off.

“So, this isn’t it,” the Doctor realized. “This isn’t where you started hearing drums. It had nothing to do with the time vortex.”

Koschei had begun to look afraid, his eyes darting from side to side. “Can I please go home now?”

The Doctor scooted down again; it disconcerted him to see the Master so small. “Do you know when the drumming started?”

The boy sobbed and pressed his arms to the sides of his head. “No!”

“But you _do_ know,” the Doctor said, chilled. He’d seen the Master do that before, shield his head like that. “It scares you, but you know. Can you help me find the drums? The time and place you first stated hearing them—can you take me there?”

“No! I’m scared! Go away—I don’t like you!”

Taking the boy by his shoulders, the Doctor said, “Koschei, look at me.”

Trembling, the lad lowered his arms.

“Do you trust me?”

After a moment, Koschei nodded.

“You know I’d never hurt you.”

Another nod.

The Doctor tapped the boy’s forehead. “Something hurts you, in here, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he sniffled.

“Will you let me find out what it is that’s hurting you? So that I can make it go away, forever? And then it will never hurt you or scare you again. This is what I do—I’m the Doctor; I fix things and make them better.”

Koschei wiped his nose on his sleeve. “All right,” he whispered.

“Good.” The Doctor stood up straight, taking the child’s hand. “Let’s just look around, and you can show me where it started.”

The landscape around them began to grow dim, then blurry and indistinct.

“No,” the Doctor groaned. “No, not now!” But it was too late; the drug had taken complete effect, the Master sliding into full unconsciousness. As Koschei faded away, the Doctor called to him, “I’ll come back!”

And then he was in the examining room. The Doctor opened his eyes, lowering his hands away from the Master’s face.

“How much of that did you see?” he asked Vamana.

“Everything.”

The room, he realized, must enable her to read minds without physical contact.

“What’d you make of it?”

“He is hiding something,” she pronounced. “Hiding it from himself.”

“I should’ve known I could never do this all in one sitting,” the Doctor sighed. Standing and stretching, he said, “Let’s get him back upstairs so he can sleep it off. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

(iv)

A pair of attendants wheeled the Master up to the room, where they tucked him into his bed. At the Doctor’s request, they put a warming pad on his feet and covered him with an extra blanket. After they departed, the Doctor had nothing to do but sit on his own bed and brood. The room had been cleaned, breakfast cleared away, and a dish of fruit set on the table. Freshly laundered clothes, one set blue, another green, lay on a chair. The Doctor pushed his pillow against the wall and leaned back, shutting his eyes to concentrate.

The Master’s mental illness didn’t surprise him. Madness was, in many ways, the dirty little secret of the Time Lords, the one thing they collectively denied, though the Doctor suspected at least a third of their number must have succumbed to one ailment or another by their twelfth or thirteenth incarnation. Personally, he’d always attributed the problem to excessive longevity, in the case of most Time Lords, compounded by millennia of stultifying boredom.

In the Master’s case, the problem was far more grim. He’d raced through his thirteen lives in seven centuries. While the Doctor himself had been only in his fourth body, the Master had been a skeletal husk, clinging to his thirteenth and final incarnation, using dangerous means to prolong his life unnaturally. Regeneration always brought with it mental instability, and undergoing the process so often, under dire circumstances and without the aid of other Time Lords, almost certainly had damaged the Master’s mind. There had been further trauma when the Master stole the body of Tremas of Traken; later, he’d been infected with the virus of the Cheetah People. Then he’d stolen a human body, and although he hadn’t survived long in that form, the virus must have lingered in his psyche, fracturing an already unstable personality.

The claim of drumming fit with the Master’s other symptoms; mentally ill people often thought they heard and saw things that no-one else experienced. The Doctor had assumed the madness must have begun when the Master had stared into the untempered schism as a child, but now it seemed the drumming had begun elsewhere. Its presence baffled the Doctor, as it had no discernable connection to anything else in the Master’s past.

He slid down until he lay prone and entered a trance state, going back over the recent mind-reading, looking for any detail that might strike him as unusual. Almost right away he found something odd: the Master cowering under a large wooden desk like a child in an air-raid drill, his arms wrapped around his head, rocking himself back and forth, moaning incoherently. On the surface of the desk, an ordinary phone and a mobile phone shrilled out an urgent duet, but the Master paid them no mind, his eyes glazed over with terror.

Shocked, the Doctor moved back through the incident, then forward at a slower pace. He disregarded the Master, looking instead at the laptop that sat open on the desk. A news feed was running, showing a scene of utter pandemonium, people fleeing as if from some unspeakable cataclysm. In the background loomed a tall, gray demonic figure. The Doctor’s hair stood on end as he watched it lurch forward, leaving a trail of human corpses anywhere its shadow fell.

A burst of static ended the feed, and the screen went blank. The phones kept up their digital cacophony; the Doctor recalled that at this time, the Master had been a high-ranking defense minister. No wonder other officials had been trying to locate him, trying to make him address the catastrophe unfolding in Cardiff.

As if someone had flipped a switch, the Master stopped rocking and moaning. His body uncoiled, and he crawled out from under his desk, pale, sweating, and trembling. The Doctor knew that hundreds of kilometers away, in Wales, Jack had defeated the demon by allowing it to feed on his own eternal life-essence. Since his immortality had been created with the energy of the time vortex, that same power destroyed the Beast—the same way it had disintegrated the Dalek fleet and destroyed the Doctor’s ninth body. With the Beast gone, the Master’s fit ended.

The Doctor’s eyes blinked open. He was sweating and gasping; with effort, he raised his head and stared at the Master’s prone form.

Abaddon, the son of the Great Beast, imprisoned in the void for eons until Jack’s team at Torchwood Three had unleashed it via the space-time rift that ran through Cardiff. The Master, with his Time Lord senses, had known this was happening even without checking the news feed, and had responded not with rational thought or action, but with quaking terror.

The Doctor wished he knew more about the Beast and its offspring, but they had existed before time, before the universe, and they’d been unknown even to the denizens of Gallifrey, even to the Time Lords themselves, who’d studied everything across time and space and dimension. The language of the Beast was so ancient not even the TARDIS could translate it.

A horrible suspicion made the Doctor sick with anxiety: what if the Master, in his desperate bid to escape death, had tried to tap the power of those unspeakably evil entities? If so, there might never be a cure for his madness. The Doctor pondered: could any being, even a Time Lord, tap the power of a demon and survive? Even one as intelligent and strong-willed as the Master couldn’t possibly hope to prevail. Abaddon would have crushed him like a bug.

A heavy cloak of weariness descended on the Doctor. He tried to fight it off, but his recent exertions took their toll, and he slid into black, dreamless unconsciousness

(v)

Noise awoke him: the Master thrashing back into awareness. The Doctor sat up, watching as the other Time Lord rolled out of his bed and tried to stand, still jelly-legged from the muscle relaxant. The Doctor hopped up and put an arm around his shoulders.

“Here, let me help.”

Snarling, the Master backhanded the Doctor, but with so little strength, the blow felt like a light smack from a plastic glove. The Doctor stepped away, watching the Master crab-crawl across the floor to the bathroom. He stood, waiting.

A muffled thud told him the Master had fallen. A moment later came an enraged yelling: “Damn you, Doctor; get in here!”

The Doctor didn’t budge. He folded his arms, counting seconds and minutes.

The Master began to spew invective in a loud scream, cursing the Doctor with the standard references to excrement, family and ancestry, deity, male and female sexual organs, and various coital practices. The Doctor kept counting: four minutes, five, six.

The outburst ended, followed by about forty seconds of silence.

“Doctor, please help me.” The voice was very different now, weak and broken.

He strolled into the bathroom, finding as he’d expected that the Master had collapsed halfway between the door and the toilet. He remembered falling over in the bathroom on the _Valiant_ , trying without success to haul himself upright, and the Master finding him, laughing for a full five minutes before summoning guards to help the old man onto the toilet.

Any lingering resentment the Doctor might have felt over the incident dissolved when he put his arms around the Master and hoisted him up, his own ability to love and forgive like a bulwark against all the Master’s petty cruelty. The Master cringed and gasped and tried to pull away, as if the Doctor’s touch seared him like fire.

“Come on,” the Doctor said, steering the Master across the floor. “Here, just lean against me and do whatever you need to do.”

The Master struggled feebly, but his need to relieve himself overwhelmed his anger and humiliation. He fumbled with the front of his trousers, leaning his weight against the Doctor as he urinated. When he was done, the Doctor steered him over to the sink to wash his hands, noting with interest that the Master didn’t look at himself in the mirror, instead keeping his head tipped down, his gaze averted. The Doctor had been doing the same thing for some while; since the Time War, he’d been avoiding his own reflection, loathing the very sight of himself.

“Out you go.” He steered the Master back into the room and helped him get into bed. The Master wiggled snake-like to the far edge of the mattress, doubled up into fetal position, and wrapped his arms around his head. The Doctor stood staring at him, dumbfounded. The Master had cowered and cringed in exactly the same posture when the Doctor had forgiven him on the _Valiant_. He’d cowered from Abaddon the same way. And as the child Koschei, he’d also wrapped his arms around his head when the Doctor had asked to be shown the source of the drumming. He’d reacted to the Doctor’s show of compassion as he had to the presence of a life-draining demon, and both of those things had roots in some dark corner of the Master’s young life on Gallifrey. The implications distressed the Doctor deeply. He watched his greatest friend, his most intractable enemy, huddle and quake in the bed until at last his body relaxed and he fell once again into unconsciousness.

(vi)

He had to go back. He could no longer return to his planet, but he could walk through his own memories the same way he could walk through the Master’s. Of course, those were only _his_ memories and perceptions, idiosyncratic, not any kind of objective truth. But there might be some clue, some detail that had seemed inconsequential in youth that might hold more meaning in hindsight. And if he was going to do this, he had to act now, while the Master still slept off the effects of the drug.

The Doctor settled himself on the bed, resting his head on the pillow, and pressed his fingertips into his temples. A moment later his body slumped, head lolling to one side. His conscious thoughts traveled deep into the core of his memory, stopping abruptly on that memorable occasion shortly before his ninth birthday.

Her name was Alula—Lady Alula—and she oversaw the education of the novice students at Prydon Academy. Normally a calm, patient woman, today strain around her eyes betrayed her agitation. She whirled into the study area of the students’ dormitory and called out, “Theta Sigma!”

The other students looked up, already too well-trained to giggle or snicker. The object of Lady Alula’s consternation sat on the opposite side of the room, staring out the window at the mountains. At last, one of the female students, a girl named Ushas, scurried over and tapped Theta Sigma on his shoulder.

“Lady Alula’s looking for you, Theet,” she whispered.

“Oh?”

With a sigh, Ushas nodded her head toward the doorway.

“Oh!” Theta Sigma rose to his feet and crossed the room. “Yes, Lady Alula?”

“Come with me.”

She didn’t say why, and Theta Sigma knew better than to question her. He followed her swirling crimson robe down the corridor, up the lift, and down another hallway, nearly at the top of the building. Theta Sigma looked around, interested; he’d never been up this high, but there was no time to examine his surroundings. Lady Alula paused at a door and, in an icy voice, announced her presence via an intercom speaker in the wall.

Once inside, they were greeted by a tall, gray-haired Time Lord with a friendly expression and twinkling brown eyes.

“Lord Borusa, this is Theta Sigma.” Her voice hadn’t lost its cold formality.

“Thank you, Lady Alula.”

The Time Lady departed, back held rigid, and the door closed behind her. Theta Sigma stared up at Lord Borusa with dawning trepidation: he’d never before spoken with the Head of Prydon Academy.

“Why don’t you have a seat?”

Nervously, Theta Sigma crept over to the closest chair and inched himself onto it. Lord Borusa was checking something on a tiny monitor; he then sat in the chair opposite the student.

“How are you today?” he inquired.

“All right,” the boy gulped.

“Lady Alula tells me you’ve just failed your third unit exam.”

A hot wave swept up Theta Sigma’s face. He knew about the first two, but he hadn’t yet heard about the third.

“You failed the general physics exam with the lowest score in the class. You’ve made no progress whatsoever in Old High Gallifreyan, and you haven’t even begun to master the rudiments of telepathy.”

Theta Sigma hung his head. He supposed the next bit of news would be Lord Borusa telling him he was expelled from the academy.

“And yet, your aptitude tests when you entered showed above-average potential in every area.”

Theta Sigma stared at Lord Borusa’s feet, not knowing what to say.

“Lady Alula’s also concerned because you don’t seem to have made any real friends.”

Theta Sigma’s head jerked up. He hadn’t expected Lord Borusa to concern himself with a novice student’s social life.

“She says your attention wanders, you have difficulty concentrating…” Borusa leaned forward. “Do you often feel lonely?”

The boy nodded. At last he whispered, “Yes, sir.”

“It’s often difficult for students in their first year,” Lord Borusa said kindly. “There’s a lot of things to learn, and it’s a big transition from the environment of the nursery pods.”

Theta Sigma nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He’d loved his nursery pod, loved the other children and the doting attendants. He’d been the only child in his pod to qualify for the academy; the rest would be going on to train for technical or manual positions. How jealous they’d been when they’d first learned he was going to become a Time Lord! But not a day had passed that he hadn’t wished himself back among them.

“Are you trying deliberately to fail so that you can go back to your old friends?”

Theta Sigma jolted.

With a chuckle, Borusa said, “Don’t worry, I didn’t need to read you for that one. If you did go back, it wouldn’t be the same: all your friends would be scattered to different cities, and the attendants would be busy with younger children. You need to learn how to make new friends here and focus on your studies. You’ve been chosen for the academy, Theta Sigma, a tremendous honor. You shouldn’t take it lightly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, I think what you need is a friend and a mentor, someone who can help you focus on your work and keep you company. I think I have just the candidate. He’s two years older than you, another novice, but quite advanced for his age.” Lord Borusa touched a communications device on his wrist. “Will you please come here now?”

A few moments later, Lord Borusa opened the door and in walked another student, also dressed in the black and white trousers and tunic of a novice. Unlike Theta Sigma, his uniform wasn’t rumpled. Lord Borusa stood to greet him.

“Yes, sir?” the boy asked.

“Koschei, this is Theta Sigma, a new student I’d like you to tutor. He’s having difficulty in all his subjects; he’ll need to retake the general exams in physics and Old High Gallifreyan. He needs work in telepathy as well. So I’d like you to focus in those areas.” Borusa’s hand lingered on the boy’s head, and he smiled down, as though Koschei were extraordinary, special. “I think six hours a week should do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why don’t you two get acquainted?”

“Yes, sir,” the boys chorused. Theta Sigma followed Koschei out of the Time Lord’s suite.

“So, Theta Sigma. Is that your real name?”

“No, it’s from my student number.” For some obscure reason, Theta Sigma had always disliked his given name. “Everyone calls me Theet.”

“All right, Theet.” The boy smiled, a wide, beautiful smile. Most Time Lords kept their faces serious and composed; the students followed suit, and Theta Sigma had been hungry for the sight of a real smile. “I’m Koschei.”

“You’re not in any of my classes.” Most of the novice students studied together and lived in the same dormitory, though the advanced novices of course were given more difficult exercises.

“I’m studying with the intermediate students, mostly,” Koschei told him. “I’ve already learned all that baby stuff.” Apologetic, he said, “Nothing personal.”

Theta Sigma cringed. “I’m surprised they haven’t thrown me out yet.”

“You wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t handle the work.” Koschei touched the control panel for the lift.

“You know your way around,” Theta Sigma observed.

“I have special dispensation,” Koschei revealed.

Theta Sigma envied that. He wondered where they were going, but he found himself falling under the sway of Koschei’s self-assurance. Already the boy moved and gestured like a Time Lord: elegant and purposeful, radiating a subtle power. As the lift rose, he stared at the boy. They both stood about the same height, slender in build. Like many Gallifreyan children, they had black hair and blue eyes, though Koschei’s curls framed his face in a pleasing way, while Theta Sigma’s hair was an uncontrollable tangle that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be straight or curly.

Koschei’s most striking feature was his skin: very pale and unblemished. Excellent bone structure gave his face its exquisite shape. He had a full mouth, the lips tinged nearly red. Extravagant lashes fringed his eyes. Just looking at him made Theta Sigma feel grubby and unkempt.

They exited the lift at a glassed-in penthouse. Theta Sigma gasped, looking around: from here, they could look out over the entire Citadel, safe within its enormous dome, and at the mountains beyond. The city itself was completely climate-controlled, so that its denizens wouldn’t be inconvenienced by unpleasant weather. Theta Sigma had never seen the city from this perspective.

“I like it up here,” Koschei declared, strolling around the rooftop garden. “I like looking down at everything. Don’t you?”

“Uh-huh,” Theta Sigma responded, walking a bit ahead, staring around in wonderment.

He felt Koschei’s hands on his shoulders. “Stand up straight,” the older boy advised. “You’re slumping.”

Theta Sigma pulled back his shoulders, trying to emulate Koschei’s posture.

“That’s better.” Koschei slid his arm through Theta Sigma’s. “Come over here.”

Theta Sigma followed without protest, finding that Koschei exerted an almost hypnotic pull over him. They sat together at a small table.

“Now, I’m going to focus on one thing,” Koschei said. “I want you to read me and tell me what it is.”

Theta Sigma squirmed. He hated telepathy; he disliked looking into other people’s minds, and he always resisted when someone else tried to look into his. But telepathy was crucial to Time Lords, enabling them to link minds and to establish empathic connections with their space-time machines.

“Come on,” Koschei coaxed. “It’s fun once you know how to do it the right way.” He took Theta Sigma’s hands and placed them at the sides of his head. “You just find the right contact points, here and here—” he demonstrated. A moment later, Theta Sigma felt himself in the boy’s mind. “Right. Now—what am I thinking about?”

Theta Sigma took a cautious look. He stood in an empty room—empty save a small table with a piece of fruit sitting on it.

“An apple,” he said. “An apple on a table.”

“Right. Now, watch this.”

As Theta Sigma watched, the apple and the table vanished. Now the room was empty, but a door had appeared at the back. He walked forward, hesitantly, and pushed a button for the door to open. Inside sat another room, with the table and apple at its center.

“You make it look so easy,” he said enviously, lowering his hands.

“It is easy. Now, I’m going to read you. Just think about the same thing: an apple on a table. Block out everything else.”

Theta Sigma tried that, tried not to think about anything except a bare room with a table and an apple. He felt Koschei’s fingers on the contact points above and below his ears. His previous experiences with mind-reading had always felt like a rude intrusion, but Koschei’s presence in his mind felt astonishing, so pleasant that Theta Sigma’s control slipped, allowing Koschei to see much more than just an apple on a table.

“Sorry,” Theta Sigma blushed.

Koschei lowered his hands. “That’s all right. Try again.”

They repeated the exercise, and this time, Theta Sigma succeeded in keeping his focus on that bare room. Moving the table into another room proved more tricky: every time the door opened, other thoughts and memories came through.

“Not bad,” Koschei praised after the fifth or sixth try. He asked, “What’s wrong; are you homesick?”

Theta Sigma nodded, his eyes brimming. Without warning he burst into tears, one of the many emotional reactions he’d been trying desperately to get under control since his arrival at the academy.

Koschei didn’t scold. Instead, he circled the table and put his arms around the younger student’s shoulders.

“It’s all right,” he said, leaning in to plant a soft kiss on Theta Sigma’s forehead. “You’re very emotional, aren’t you? I saw that in your mind.”

“I can’t help it,” Theta Sigma sniffled.

Koschei rubbed the back of his head. “You miss your nursery pod.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You miss home… you grew up in the mountains.”

“I miss it there. I don’t like the city as much.”

“You just haven’t seen the right bits yet,” Koschei said. “I can show you.”

Theta Sigma brightened up. “You can?”

“I’ll ask Lord Borusa.” He said the Time Lord’s name so casually, as though they were equals. Koschei’s eyes shone when he said, “You should see the garden where the TARDISes grow.”

“You’ve been there?” Theta Sigma breathed. All the students had heard about that garden; it was nothing short of legendary.

“Lord Borusa showed me. He even explained a little bit about how they work. It’s very complex; I’m just beginning to understand time travel now. I’m sure he’ll let you see it if I ask him. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” Theta Sigma said, wiping his face.

“Don’t worry about feeling homesick… everyone does, sooner or later.”

“Did you?”

“I grew up in the Citadel. It’s always been home.”

“Are your parents Time Lords?”

“Yes; aren’t yours?”

“They are, but they’d rather live outside the cities.”

“That’s odd,” said Koschei. He smiled at Theta Sigma, playing with the younger boy’s hair and tracing fingertips across his round face. Theta Sigma enjoyed the physical contact; he’d been longing for that almost as much as he’d yearned for the sight of a real smile. “You’re a funny little thing, did you know that?”

Theta Sigma grew hot again.

“Let’s go back to the common room, and you can show me what’s giving you trouble in physics.”

Koschei straightened up, and as he lowered his arm, Theta Sigma glimpsed something odd on the outer part of the older boy’s wrist, a shiny, white band. Then the sleeve of Koschei’s tunic dropped down, covering the mark. He took Theta Sigma by the arm, and they returned to the lift.

“You know who can help you learn Old High Gallifreyan? Ushas,” Koschei said. “She’s already memorized the Prime Epic of ….”

(vii)

The Doctor returned to the present, reaching up to touch his face. Wet: he’d been crying in his trance. He sat, swallowing over the tight constriction in his throat. Over on the other bed, the Master hadn’t moved, but his breathing indicated he’d be awake in fifteen or twenty minutes. The Doctor hopped up, grabbed the clean blue hospital uniform, and vanished into the bathroom.

In the shower, he pulled his emotional control back together; it wouldn’t do to have the Master see him like this. He never delved into his old memories, knowing how shredded they would leave him feeling. Seeing his dead planet, the academy, the faces of people now lost forever—those were bad enough. Even worse was seeing himself as a child: young, innocent, lonely. Worst of all was reliving his friendship with the Master and knowing what lay ahead for them. He’d never stopped bitterly regretting their estrangement.

They’d been inseparable for years, even after Koschei moved fully from the novice level to the intermediate level. Theta Sigma’s grades had improved enough for him to pass his most crucial exams, and he’d surpassed expectations in the one or two subject areas that truly interested him. He’d taken Koschei’s advice and sought out Ushas, another intelligent novice, who’d drilled him in Old High Gallifreyan until he’d memorized enough of the endless epics to cobble together a passing mark. She’d been a proud, haughty girl, even by Time Lord standards, and few others had warmed up to her, but Koschei and Theta Sigma—also oddballs in their own ways—had found her good company. Like the Doctor and the Master, she’d ultimately fled Gallifrey and become another famous renegade, taking on the alias Rani.

The Doctor tried to distance himself from his grief, tried to look back over his memories with a more detached eye. As a child, the Master had exhibited no signs of mental illness, no indications of cruelty or callousness. He’d been a warm, funny, perceptive child, but somewhere in his adulthood he’d changed irretrievably for the worse. The Doctor could pinpoint almost the exact time when their friendship had fallen apart: after the Master’s first regeneration.

He tried not to dwell on those regrets, focusing instead on their first meeting. One moment jumped out at him with unexpected clarity: the white mark on Koschei’s wrist. As a youngster, the Doctor hadn’t recognized what he was seeing, but as an adult he knew that the white, shiny band must have been scar tissue.

He frowned, mulling that over. Gallifreyan physiology was tough, resistant, their medical science among the most sophisticated in the universe. If Koschei had injured himself as a child, it would have been well-tended. The Doctor examined his own limbs; even with all the wear and tear he’d put on his body, he couldn’t recall ever having had a scar. Anytime he’d been injured, he’d healed thoroughly, with alacrity.

Now, of course, the Master’s scar would be gone after so many regenerations. He probably didn’t even remember the injury that had produced it; anyway, prying the truth out of him would take more effort than it was worth.

Still, the Doctor couldn’t help thinking the scar carried some significance, given the way his subconscious mind had hyper-focused on that particular memory.

He dried, dressed, and went out into the room, where the Master had finally thrashed himself into wakefulness. Without looking at the Doctor, he snatched up the fresh green suit and scurried into the loo.

(viii)

“That girl.”

The two-word statement came out of nowhere. They’d both been lying on their beds, silent, staring up at the ceiling, refusing to discuss the morning’s events.

“What girl?” the Doctor asked.

“That girl... the one with the curly hair.”

Baffled, the Doctor stared at the other Time Lord. Who did he mean, some patient or worker they had passed in the hallway?

Impatient, the Master said, “She used to travel with you.”

The Doctor ran through a quick list of his former traveling companions. “Nyssa? What about her?”

“Where is she?”

Laughing, the Doctor said, “Thinking of looking her up, are you?”

“Where is she?”

“Why do you care?” The Doctor grew serious.

The Master shrugged and didn’t elaborate. The trip back through his memories must have brought Nyssa to the surface. The Doctor propped himself up on one elbow, trying to read the Master’s expression.

Without softening the blow, he said, “She’s dead.”

The Master grunted. Some minutes passed before he sneered, “Got herself killed on one of your little escapades?”

“No, she died in a leper colony on Terminus.”

“What?”

“It was a space station where people suffering Lazar’s Disease were sent to die.”

The Master turned over to face the Doctor. “What, and you didn’t try to cure her?”

“She left the TARDIS to work on the colony. Helped turn it into a hospital and developed a radiation cure for the patients. But her body was exposed to so much radiation during the work that it started breaking down, until she finally died.”

“A tearful death in your arms, no doubt.”

“No, she was gone long before I went back there. There’s a little plaque in her memory. One of the other workers gave me a last message from her.”

The Master pushed up onto his elbow, watching the Doctor’s face.

“What’d she say?”

The Doctor snorted, “You really think I’m going to tell you that?” He turned onto his back and stared up at the ceiling again.

“You don’t sound terribly upset about it,” the Master goaded.

“It happened a long time ago.” He didn’t tell the Master that he’d gone back to Terminus not long after their clash in San Francisco; the incident had stirred a lot of pain, and the Doctor had thought to reconnect with some of his old friends. Learning of Nyssa’s death had been such a blow that he’d dropped the idea of a nostalgia tour completely.

The Master let about thirty minutes slide past before he asked, “Why didn’t she try to cure herself?”

“Hmm?”

“If she was smart enough to develop a cure for Lazar’s Disease, she ought to have found one for radiation poisoning. It’s hardly an obscure ailment.”

“She could have, but she didn’t want to.”

“That was stupid.”

“What did she have left to live for?” the Doctor asked, still staring at the ceiling. “You murdered her father and stole his body, you destroyed her planet, you took away everything she cared about, everything that held any meaning to her. She had nothing to hold on to, and in the end, it was easier to let herself die.”

He heard a subtle shift in the Master’s breathing and glanced over to find the other Time Lord staring at him.

“You’re lying.”

“After we leave here, we can visit the hospital if you want, and you can see it for yourself.”

“I’ve had quite enough of hospitals.” The Master asked, “Is that what she said in her final message to you? That she had nothing left to live for?”

The Doctor turned his gaze upward again. “She didn’t mention you, if that’s what you’re hoping.” He shut his eyes. “And people accuse _me_ of having an ego.”

About five minutes passed, and the Doctor began laughing.

“Oh, will you shut up!” the Master exploded.

“Sorry,” the Doctor chuckled. “I find it amusing that you were hoping I’d say she’d forgiven you.”

“I was not hoping that, you noisome fuckwit! Why would I ever—that’s bollocks!”

“What’s the matter, old mate? Conscience bothering you?”

The Master didn’t answer, falling into a strop that didn’t end even when the hospital attendants brought around their dinner.

**To be continued…**


	3. Sympathy for the Devil--Part Three

Part III

_Emotional Rescue_

After dinner—the Doctor again eating the majority of the food on the table—they returned to their beds like hostile alley cats pissing to mark their territory. The Master continued his petulant silence; the Doctor meditated, his unflappable serenity maddening to his old foe. If anything, the Master’s anger only increased his calm.

It gave him perverse satisfaction when the Master began talking, unable to bear the silence. Perhaps he found that silence amplified the drumming in his head. Maybe his constant need to create chaos—warfare, explosions, screams—and his constant need to have noise around him—music, television, his own voice—was nothing more than an attempt to drown out the incessant, inescapable cacophony.

“That whiny American with the big tits—whatever happened to her?”

“Still fixated on companions, are we?”

“If you can think of a more scintillating topic of conversation, let’s have it.”

“Peri married King Yrcanos.”

“ _What?_ ” the Master laughed. “Yrcanos? Of Thoros Alpha? Is that a joke? That blowhard?”

The Doctor couldn’t help laughing also. “I’ve seen stranger things, but not many.”

“And yet it’s oddly fitting that a girl whose voice was like an instrument of torture married a man whose voice could cause earthquakes from a galaxy away.”

“Think of the offspring,” the Doctor said, and the two of them enjoyed an unkind snicker at poor Peri’s expense.

“Though given what _you_ were like in those days, it’s hardly a surprise she fell for him,” the Master jibed.

“Fair enough,” the Doctor said agreeably. “It was a relief to be rid of her—I never understood why she wanted to travel with me in the first place. Scared of her own shadow, that one, never appreciated anything I showed her.”

“What about that little spice-pot, the one who liked to blow things up?”

“Ace?”

“That’s the one.”

“She left.”

“Left?” the Master taunted. “As in walked out on you?”

“Yup.”

“Ah, those companions, always breaking your hearts.”

“She was a seventeen-year-old human. What else would you expect?”

“Is she still alive?”

“How should I know? I haven’t seen her since.”

“I’ll bet you weren’t so sanguine at the time.”

“I listened to blues and sulked for a week, then I got on with my life.”

The Master gave him a disbelieving look. The Doctor was hardly willing to share with him the pain of Ace’s departure. They’d had a beastly row, and Ace had stormed out of the TARDIS. The Doctor had tried to make her stop, but she’d been enraged, cramming things into her backpack and screaming insults at him. The ship had echoed after her departure, and the Doctor had been miserable.

He hadn’t mentioned to Ace at the time, because he hadn’t wanted her either to get a swollen head or to resist his plans, but he’d intended to bring her to Gallifrey. Humans would never be permitted to train at the academy, but Ace’s mind had been first-rate, able to grasp concepts that normally would have been far beyond human understanding; she’d also shown some innate telepathic skills and a sensitivity to time. He could see no reason why she should not become a Time Lord, and he’d been planning to call in a few favors to have her start training.

Now, of course, he was extraordinarily grateful for her youthful impetuousness. Had his plan come to fruition, Ace would have perished along with the rest of Gallifrey. He didn’t know where she was, but he hoped she was alive and happy, thriving. Maybe he would see her someday again, maybe not; he was content to let the TARDIS make that decision for him. His experience with Nyssa had taught him not to go looking for his former companions.

“Like you got on with your life after losing Rose?” The Master made a melodramatic drawl of her name, “ _Rooooseee_.”

“What else was I going to do? Crawl away somewhere and die? She wasn’t the first companion I lost, and she won’t be the last, either.”

“So, exactly what universe did she end up in?”

“The one where the sky is magenta, the buildings are made of candy, and the oceans are full of hot buttered rum.”

“In other words, whatever universe Torchwood was bringing in the Cybermen from?”

“If you were so curious, why didn’t you hop over there yourself while the breach was open?” The Doctor grinned. “Didn’t want to get trapped? Or were you too afraid of the big metal monsters?”

“I’m a Time Lord; I know better than to play with intra-dimensional fractures.”

Shouting with laughter, the Doctor said, “You’d be the first one to play with an unstable fracture if you thought you could use it to your own ends! You didn’t want to tip your hand too soon and let me know you were alive. Otherwise, you’d have been more than happy to nip across the void for a look. Why wreak havoc in one reality when you can wreak havoc in two?”

The Master grunted.

“Of course, you probably didn’t have high enough security clearance to warrant a tour of Torchwood,” the Doctor taunted. “Hadn’t worked your way up the political ladder yet.”

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” the Master said, as though explaining some simple fact to an imbecile.

“No, I would imagine seducing politicians’ daughters takes time.”

The Master’s eyes flashed. “Don’t you dare start in on Lucy!”

“Why not? You have no qualms about taking potshots at my companions.”

“She’s not my companion; she’s my wife!”

“Wife?” the Doctor laughed. “In what sense was she your wife? She was barely even your concubine. She was a means to an end, a plaything you used to cement your rise to power. You may’ve signed the paper and gone through the ceremony, but your marriage was a sham, a joke, as meaningless to you as gnats or fireflies.”

“And what was Rose to you?” the Master sneered. “Were you man enough to do the deed with her, or did gallant virtue keep your fly zipped? Did you really love her, or was she something you clung to after the Time War, a glorified human teddy bear with tits and a cunt?”

The Doctor gave him a pitying look. “Try loving something besides yourself, and then ask me that question again.”

“Love,” the Master snorted. “The great human weakness. You’ve become so human yourself, you might as well settle on Earth and live among the whole feces-flinging lot of them.”

“Martha Jones loves me and believes in me enough to get an entire planet, billions of people, to think about me for one instant,” the Doctor said. “When’s the last time someone loved you like that?”

After a few moments of silence, the Doctor said, “I didn’t think so.”

(ii)

The night passed without incident, though the Doctor could hear the Master sighing and tossing, as if unable to get comfortable. He could have asked for a sedative or put himself in a trance, but pride and his habitual paranoia wouldn’t let himself relax in his enemy’s presence. The Doctor made no offers to assuage the Master’s discomfort; if the Master wanted any kind of relief, he would need to learn how to ask for it.

The ritual of the second morning progressed much as the first had: barber, breakfast, Vamana’s arrival, the trip down the lift to the examining room.

This time the Master didn’t fight. He flinched and twitched, but he at least managed to muster a pretext of dignity. Before letting himself be sedated, he nipped into the adjacent loo, smirking at the Doctor as he did so.

“All things considered,” he said.

Once back in the examining chair, he held up his right arm and let the Doctor inject him without protest. Then he lay back, singing some ridiculous pop song while his eyes dilated to big, crazy circles. The Doctor envied his beautiful voice.

“You remember that one, Doctor?” He flashed a loopy, malicious grin. “Summer of 1983. One of those one-hit wonders. They used to play the video endlessly on MTV.”

“Oh, yes, it enriched my life immeasurably.”

The Master rolled his eyes back up toward Vamana. “Excellent dope, Blue-face. First-rate. I really must congratulate you. I hope you’ll be willing to loan me a stash when we leave. Being the Doctor’s prisoner, I think I’m going to need it.”

“Shh.” The Doctor put a finger to the Master’s lips.

“The magical mystery tour begins again.”

“Just relax,” the Doctor said, finding the contact points on either side of the Master’s head. The other Time Lord sighed, relaxing, and they started.

(iii)

The Doctor didn’t waste any time in the present, looking over things he already knew; he flashed back through the centuries until he reached the Master’s childhood, only pausing to look about for Koschei.

He couldn’t find the child anywhere: not near the untempered schism, not in the academy building, not anywhere. The Master was hiding his younger self. The Doctor reached out, extending all his senses, until he at last found a point of contact, willing himself closer to it.

He blinked, disoriented by the change of scenery. He stood in what appeared to be a bedroom—no, a nursery—from an Earth home, a curious Victorian pastiche. A small fire crackled in a cozy fireplace, framed sepia-toned photos on the mantelpiece. The furniture was all very small, child-sized, upholstered in bright fabrics, the cushions deep and soft. Toys lay scattered about the hearth rug. Curtains printed with safari animals covered the windows. No child’s bedroom on Gallifrey had ever looked like this; the Master’s mind had for some odd reason concocted a fantasy dreamscape of nostalgic innocence.

Curled up on a sweet little bed lay Koschei, the image of childlike peace. One arm hugged a teddy bear, the thumb of the other hand in his mouth. He looked so beautiful and cozy, the Doctor couldn’t bear the thought of disturbing him.

“Oh, you clever beast,” he murmured, scooting down beside the child. “You knew I’d find this sort of thing irresistible.” He put a gentle hand on Koschei’s cheek. “Love, it’s time to wake up.”

One blue eye opened halfway. “Don’t want to,” Koschei murmured.

The Doctor kissed him and gave him a tickle. Koschei giggled and turned away. “No. I’m sleepy.”

“We were going to have a grand adventure today,” the Doctor said, shaking the boy. “Don’t you remember?”

“Noooooo,” Koschei protested, but the Doctor scooped him up and lifted him out of the bed.

“This is a very clever waste of time,” the Doctor said, setting the boy on his feet. “Remember me? It’s the Doctor. You were going to show me something today.”

Koschei tried to get back into the bed, but the Doctor led him by the hand to a nearby door. Ignoring the boy’s whimpers, the Doctor pulled the door open.

The drumming hit them at full blast, and Koschei screamed, trying to flee back inside, but the Doctor pushed the door shut with his foot.

“Make it quiet down!” the Doctor barked. “It’s your mind; you control it!”

Koschei’s face scrunched up, and a moment later, the drumming settled down to a more bearable volume.

“Right,” the Doctor said, trying to hide his miserable guilt at the ordeal to which he was subjecting this child. “Now—all I want is for you to show me where the drumming comes from. You said you’d take me there.”

They stood on a path on one of Gallifrey’s multitude of mountains. Unlike Earth, which consisted of landmasses floating on a vast ocean, Gallifrey had been a massive continent interspersed with inland seas, and much of that land had been mountainous. At one time, when the world had been very young, the oceans had been more plentiful, but as the millennia passed, mountains had pushed up, displacing the seas.

A chilly wind whipped around them, and Koschei shivered, pressing his face into the Doctor’s tan overcoat.

“It’s all right,” the Doctor said. “You’re a brave boy. You can do this. Come on.”

Koschei pointed down into a tree-filled valley. The Doctor frowned; those weren’t the beautiful silver-leaved trees of Gallifrey’s mountains. That was a poisonous green jungle.

“That’s where it comes from?” And indeed, the Doctor could hear the throbbing echo from beneath the leaf canopy.

The boy nodded, his young face contorting with terror.

“Let’s go, then. I’ll be right here with you.”

They walked down. The trail was difficult, steep, strewn about with loose gravel and boulders from rockslides. The heat from the two suns burned, and the Doctor grew terribly hot in his suit and coat. The constant wind gusts threatened to blow them off their feet, and the Doctor kept a firm hold on Koschei. He recognized the elemental disturbances as distractions the Master was concocting in an effort to run down the clock.

At one point, the trail petered out in a jumble of boulders. Peering over the side of the cliff, the Doctor could make out another trail, further down.

“All right, I’m going to lower you over the side with my coat,” he said, slipping out of the sleeves.

“No! It’s too scary!”

“Then show me an easier way down.”

Koschei focused for a moment, and a path appeared among the boulders.

“Thank you,” the Doctor smiled.

The lower part of the trail opened out into a broad, steep slope that led straight to the edge of the dense, menacing forest. The Doctor began to make his way down gingerly, but a powerful gust of wind sent him sprawling. He yelled, lost his footing, and began to roll and bounce painfully down the rocky slope.

“ _Koschei!_ ” he bellowed, trying in vain to stop, but every rock he grabbed came loose, and he was unable to halt his downward his momentum. Sky, rocks, trees, all flashed in and out of his vision, and worst of all, he’d completely lost sight of the boy.

“ _No!_ ” he thundered. “No, I won’t let you do this!” He somehow managed to turn his body ninety degrees, so that he was no longer rolling horizontally down the slope. Digging his feet into the loose stone, he slowed himself, then came to a full stop.

“Koschei! Where are you?”

His voice echoed over the desolate rock-scape. Then he heard a sound that tore at his soul: the boy was lost somewhere, crying.

“Where are you? Koschei?” Somehow, the Doctor hauled himself upright, maintaining a precarious balance, despite the pain of seemingly a million bruises and lacerations. His fingernails were ragged, his hands covered with blood.

The crying could be coming from anywhere, given the distortions caused by the angry wind. The Doctor tried to pinpoint the sound’s location, but it seemed to be coming from all around him at once.

He stopped shouting and spoke in a calmer voice, as if the lad were right beside him.

“Koschei, stop this wind at once.”

The wind moaned, whistled, and then dropped. The sobbing became quite distinct now, and beneath it, the Doctor heard a sinister laugh.

He looked down, amazed to see that Koschei had somehow reached the bottom of the slope already, where the rocks ended in a strip of sand. The boy was hunkered over, still crying. The Doctor couldn’t tell where the laughing came from.

He made his way down the rocks, keeping his balance low, maddened by his inability to move faster. The Doctor reminded himself sternly of his year trapped in an elderly, incapacitated body: if he could be patient then, he could be patient now. Not taking his gaze from Koschei, he made it off the stony slope to where the ground leveled out into a field of loose scree. As soon as he could run, he did so, feet crunching across the stone.

“What is it; what’s that laughing?” he asked. The voice was closer now, and it held an eerily familiar quality. The Doctor’s hair stood on end. “Koschei?”

“It’s laughing at me!” the boy sobbed.

The Doctor listened. That voice—posh, haughty—he knew its tones. Oh, yes, he knew its tones too well. He stared down at the sand, his skin crawling with gooseflesh. Grimacing at the pain in his limbs, he knelt awkwardly beside Koschei and began to brush at the sand.

“No!” the boy whispered.

The sand wasn’t very deep; it covered a layer of glass—a mirror—and when the Doctor cleared away enough sand, what he saw chilled him to the core.

It was _him_. As if reflected back in some creepy psychic fun-house mirror, he saw himself as he’d been in his third incarnation: the large head, the handsome, craggy face, the big pile of white hair, the ruffled shirt and bottle-green velvet smoking jacket. He was staring up, looking not at the tenth Doctor but at Koschei, and he was laughing.

The Doctor turned his face to the lad. “This is what frightens you? This is your deep-seated fear? Me? Laughing at you?”

Teary and ashamed, the boy nodded.

The Doctor sighed. “Do you really think I’d be so cruel?”

Koschei stared at him, not understanding.

“This is all you,” the Doctor said, waving his hand over his laughing image. “It’s your own inability to trust others, to believe in their decency. This is what _you’re_ like, and since this is how you are, you believe it’s how everyone else is, too.”

Koschei gulped. The Doctor reached out to embrace him, grimacing as he moved his banged-up shoulders.

“I’m going through this effort because I care about you,” he said, rubbing the child’s back. “I wouldn’t scorn you or mock you or make fun of you. I think you know that, too. Don’t you?”

After a moment, the boy whispered, “Yes.”

“All right, then. Well, I’ve had enough of the laughing dandy. Haven’t you?”

Koschei nodded. He concentrated for a moment, and the laughing stopped. The image in the glass faded away. The Doctor eased himself upright and kicked sand on top of the mirror.

“All right, we’ve delayed long enough.” He pointed to the woods. “In there,” he said. “That’s where we’re going.” Hand in hand, they approached the dark, foreboding trees. “Now, the interesting thing is that the young of so many species have this same nightmare: of being lost or alone—perhaps not in woods, but nevertheless separated from adults, from their tribe, from safety.”

“They do?” Koschei quavered.

“Yes. And this is what your mind has created—this nightmare.” They stopped. The Doctor could see no way into the dense trees, but he heard the drumming, very distinct. Koschei shuddered.

“Go on, then,” the Doctor encouraged. “Show us the way in.”

After another moment’s concentration, a path appeared—a tiny thread of a thing, but it would suffice.

The Doctor slipped off his necktie. “Take my hand,” he said, and the boy did. “Now, I’m going to tie us together, so we won’t be separated. No matter what happens in there, remember: _I’m here_. I’m here; I won’t let you go.”

“All right.”

The Doctor wrapped the length of silk around their hands, tying it snugly at his wrist. “Come on, then.”

The dense canopy of leaves blocked out all sunlight, yet the jungle was humid, suffocatingly hot. In the trees, they could hear the faint cries and growls of strange, predatory creatures. Koschei’s breathing became shallow, frightened, and he stumbled, tugging desperately on the Doctor’s arm, trying to turn back.

“No,” the Doctor said, keeping his voice quiet. “When we find out what that drumming is, all of these scary things will go away.”

They kept moving, though toward what, the Doctor couldn’t tell. He was acutely aware of the time, knowing that at any moment, the Master could slide into complete unconsciousness, ending the session. He stepped on something underfoot—a snake? He shuddered. No, a tree root. He kept the child close to his side as they progressed deeper into the hellish jungle.

The attack came without warning, a long spear piercing the Doctor right through his gut. He screamed and dropped to his knees, clutching the wooden shaft in futility.

“Koschei!” Blood bubbled up through his mouth. Somehow the boy had gotten loose: the necktie flopped uselessly around the Doctor’s left wrist.

Another spear pierced his shoulders. The Doctor topped over on his side, grunting. He could hear Koschei crying again. Savages surrounded them, hideous humanoid brutes, their faces concealed by grotesque masks. Skulls and bones decorated their bodies, no doubt the skeletal remains of butchered Time Lords.

He tried to speak, but only a torrent of blood came out. One of the savages stabbed him brutally in the leg. The Doctor reached out in a desperate telepathic bid to Koschei.

_Make them leave!_ he implored the child. _This is your mind, your world! You control it! Don’t let them win, Koschei! Don’t let them rule you!_

The sobbing intensified, and at last, through his tears, Koschei whimpered, “Go away.” The savages paused, and in a louder, stronger voice, Koschei ordered, “Go away!”

The warriors blurred and faded and vanished.

The Doctor couldn’t move, his body still pierced and bleeding. _Help me!_ he begged.

“I can’t,” the child sobbed.

_Yes, you can! If you want to, you can!_

Leaves rustled as the boy crept closer. He wrapped a small hand around the nearest wooden shaft and whispered, “Go away.”

The spears faded away as if they’d never existed. Phantom pain throbbed deep in the Doctor’s bones, but he was able to drag himself to his feet.

“Thank you,” he said, hugging the boy. “You are a brave, brave child.”

“Can we go home?”

“No,” the Doctor said. “Not yet.” Now that he could think straight, he asked, “What were they hiding?”

“Hiding?”

“Oh, come,” the Doctor chided. “A jungle, ruthless warriors? They were guarding something, something you’re keeping hidden from everything and everyone, even yourself.”

The drumming became louder, more clear, a constant rhythm beaten out on a primitive hide drum.

“It’s here,” the Doctor said. “You’ve buried it beneath layers and layers of fear and pain.” He gripped Koschei’s shoulders. “Face it!” he exhorted. “Face down your fear and conquer it!”

Koschei gulped. He screwed up his eyes, hid his face in the Doctor’s chest, and pointed.

The Doctor looked. At first he saw nothing, but then it seemed to him that a ray of sunlight filtered its way into the depths of the jungle. And then he saw, at the base of a monstrous tree, a door.

He took Koschei’s hand and inched closer. “I’ll be,” he breathed softly. The gnarled roots of the tree protected the door, and the Doctor could see it was a tiny, childish thing, like something from Neverland or Wonderland. It wasn’t a Gallifreyan door or a door that would be found anywhere in a scientifically advanced society. The design was primitive: heavy, strong wood, reinforced with metal strips. The Doctor could just discern a keyhole.

He turned to Koschei. “I can’t open that with my sonic screwdriver,” he said. “Only you can open it.”

With great reluctance, the boy reached into his tunic, drawing out a length of old-fashioned iron chain, at the end of which swung a miniature key.

“That’s a little too much chain for that key,” the Doctor smiled.

“I have to keep it here, where it’s safe.”

“The chain’s loose,” the Doctor observed, lifting the loop, showing Koschei that it would slip up over his head. “You can take it off if you want to, any time.”

Around them, the jungle began to blur and fade.

The Doctor seized Koschei in his arms and held him. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he promised. “And then we’ll go through that door, together.” He held onto Koschei as long as he could, until the dreamscape broke up and the Doctor was back in his own body, aching from the phantom injuries. He could still feel the shape of the boy’s body in his arms.

“A secret door in a savage jungle?” he said out loud, regarding the Master’s sleeping face. “Freud would have a field day with that one.”

(iv)

The Doctor took advantage of the Master’s sedation to catch up on his own sleep. The trance state couldn’t substitute for real sleep indefinitely, and the past few days—not to mention the past year—had taken their toll. The Doctor kicked off his hospital sandals, slid beneath the covers, and dropped into a thick slumber. He dreamed.

Summers on Gallifrey tended to be hot, blistering, due to the two suns, and few ventured from the pleasant coolness of the domed cities. Daylight lasted for all but an hour, so the glass of the dome would be tinted to allow the city’s populace some relief from the endless light.

Classes at the academy ran all year round, but in the summer, there would be a four-day holiday at the end of each lunar cycle, and students could do whatever they pleased. Theta Sigma mostly slept away the drowsy days, only rousing himself with great reluctance to tackle whatever homework had been assigned to the students.

A soft bleeping noise interrupted his nap on the second afternoon. Theta Sigma blinked awake and touched the intercom button. “Who is it?” he yawned.

“It’s me, you lazy slug.”

Laughing, Theta Sigma opened the door. Koschei bounded inside, dressed in the gray tunic and trousers of intermediate students. Red trim at the cuffs of his sleeves and the hem of the trousers marked him as a member of Prydon Academy.

“Come on,” he said, holding out his hands. “Up, up, up.”

“What?” Theta Sigma yawned.

“Time to clear out the space dust.” Koschei tapped on Theta Sigma’s forehead. “We’re going swimming.” He pulled the younger student out of his narrow bed.

“It’s too hot and bright out there,” Theta Sigma complained.

“Not where we’re going.” Koschei’s eyes shone with a mischievous blue light. He thrust a towel into Theta Sigma’s hands.

They left the dormitory and crossed through the quiet city streets, nodding to the gold-clad guard who stood watch at one of the Citadel’s entrances. Outside, the heat enveloped them like a tangible, living thing, a shocking change from the cool of the city. Overhead, the two suns blazed, tinting the sky its characteristic shade of burnt orange.

Koschei stuck to a shady trail that led up into the hills, beneath the protective cover of the densely-leafed trees. Theta Sigma admired them, as he always did: the black trunks towering up into the air, the silver leaves rustling in the faint breeze. He knew from his studies of botany that the roots of those trees went far down into the soil, tapping the deep groundwater.

The two boys clambered up rocks and over roots, scaling one of the foothills nearest the Citadel. They didn’t speak much—they’d been friends for so long now that they’d developed the Time Lord ability to sense each other’s thoughts and feelings. Theta Sigma discerned Koschei’s pleasure at freedom and the outdoors; Koschei felt Theta Sigma’s enjoyment of his friend’s company. They no longer shared classes or a dormitory, but Koschei had continued tutoring Theta Sigma, so they saw each other almost daily. Koschei had recently turned fifteen, though he didn’t look it. Many of the other young Time Lords had begun to shoot up, but Koschei, like Theta Sigma, stood rather on the small side.

The trail took them to a ledge, which circled around a large standing stone. In the shady side of the stone lay a pool of azure water.

“How’d you ever find this?” Theta Sigma asked, marveling at the natural wonder.

“Luck,” Koschei grinned, kicking off his shoes and pulling his tunic over his head. “Just exploring,” he added, tossing his shirt aside. “It’s warm—the water sits in the sun half the day, so by the time the pool’s in shade, it’s like a bath.” He finished undressing and plunged in.

Theta Sigma disrobed quickly and lowered himself into the pool, trying not to feel self-conscious. At thirteen, his body had begun changing—normal changes, he knew, but the process disconcerted him nevertheless. He envied Koschei’s supreme comfort in his own skin. Of course, Koschei had always been beautiful… he struck out across the pool, then filled his lungs with air and plunged down.

An astonishing world opened up beneath the surface. Mineral deposits lined the walls of the deep well, some glowing with a crystalline light. The water was so clear that the boys could see almost straight to the bottom. Theta Sigma spotted Koschei, down deeper, touching the stones, awed. Theta Sigma swam to his side, and Koschei nodded, pointing further down.

With their powerful cardiovascular systems, Gallifreyans were natural swimmers, able to stay submerged for extended periods of time. The two boys kicked their way down, untroubled by the increasing water pressure, as far as the fading light allowed them to see. The best stones were close to the bottom. Theta Sigma managed to pry one loose before the need for oxygen drove him back up.

“Look at this!” he gasped, shaking water from his hair. Koschei swam over and inspected the vivid purple crystal.

“There’s a red one I want, but it’s a long way down,” he said.

“Be careful,” Theta Sigma admonished.

Koschei smiled as he always did when Theta Sigma said something he found especially adorable. Then the older boy took a deep breath and dove again. Theta Sigma spent a few seconds fretting, then plunged down after him.

The stone Koschei sought was far, far down, almost out of the range of light. _He should wait and come back when the sunlight’s on the pool_ , Theta Sigma thought. _It’d be easier then_. But Koschei had a daring streak; he liked a bit of danger to spice up his adventures. He also liked showing off, proving he could do things nobody else would even try. Theta Sigma followed, kicking hard, worried about his friend’s safety.

In the murky gloom near the bottom of the deep well, Koschei struggled to loosen a stone from the wall. Theta Sigma saw why his friend coveted this specimen: it glowed deep red, unlike most of the other blue, green, and purple stones. But it wouldn’t come loose, and Koschei was growing weak from the effort.

Theta Sigma pushed him aside, grabbed hold of the red crystal, and yanked for all he was worth. It wouldn’t budge. He tried again, then a third time. It popped out into his hand, leaving a dark gash in the wall. Theta Sigma turned to his friend in triumph, then jolted in horror to see Koschei drifting aimlessly in the water a few feet over his head.

He vaulted off the wall, grabbing the older boy around the torso, and dragging him up, clutching onto the stone. Until now, he’d never realized just how much a body could weigh, or how heavy the weight of water could be, pressing down. He knew he ought to let go of the stone, but some stubborn, crazy part of him couldn’t stop thinking how disappointed Koschei would be to lose it—and how angry. Determined, Theta Sigma kicked his way to the surface, feeling his lungs would explode. He’d exhausted nearly all the reserves of oxygen in his respiratory bypass system when, at last, he thrust his head up into the air and gasped, dragging Koschei out of the water.

_Lord Borusa’s going to kill me_ , Theta Sigma thought, getting his shoulders under Koschei’s body and rolling the boy up onto the ledge. Before that day, Theta Sigma hadn’t tested his physical strength to its limits; under other circumstances, he would have been pleased to know he wasn’t such a weakling after all.

Koschei wasn’t breathing. Panicking, Theta Sigma filled his lungs to capacity with air and exhaled into his friend’s mouth. With his fingers, he felt desperately for a pulse in the other boy’s neck. Nothing, not even one pulse, let alone two.

He pushed the heels of his hands into Koschei’s chest and kept breathing into his mouth, all while thinking, _No… no, you can’t possibly be dead! All for a stupid rock!_

Koschei let out a violent, liquid gasp, water spilling from his mouth and nostrils. Theta Sigma helped him roll over so that gravity could aid the process. The older boy’s hearts had started again, pounding in tandem. He coughed and gasped and wheezed, water spraying everywhere.

“Where—where—is—it?”

“Where’s what?” Theta Sigma asked frantically.

“The—rock!”

Chagrined, Theta Sigma said, “It’s right there,” and pointed.

Koschei grinned weakly, crawling over and picking the thing up. “Yes!” he exulted, kissing the glowing red rock. “You beauty!”

Theta Sigma’s anxiety morphed into acute aggravation. “You ass!” he shouted, his voice cracking. “You almost got yourself killed over that stupid thing!”

“When I finish training, I’m going to have a ring made from this,” Koschei announced, still fighting to catch his breath. “Maybe ornament my robes with it, too.”

“And I’ll tell everyone how you almost drowned getting the rock, and how I had to save your miserable life!” Theta Sigma chided.

“You’re such an old woman!” Koschei laughed.

“ _I_ pulled out the damned stone, and _I_ kept you from drowning!” Theta Sigma retorted. “Next time, maybe I’ll just leave you there!”

“Ah, you wouldn’t,” Koschei teased. He set aside the rock and bounced back over to Theta Sigma, pulling the younger boy into his arms. “Not you. You’re more reliable than the sunrise.” He tipped Theta Sigma’s face up to his and kissed him on the mouth.

Startled, Theta Sigma went rigid all over, not knowing how to react to this sudden passion. Any time Koschei had kissed him before, it had been to the forehead or the top of his hair, teasing and light-hearted. This was something entirely new: the kiss went on longer, Koschei’s lips very soft against his; moreover, they were both wet and flushed and disconcertingly naked. Theta Sigma groaned in his throat when Koschei parted his lips, tasting the inside of his mouth. Koschei pushed the younger boy’s mouth open further, and their teeth clicked. Theta Sigma didn’t know why Koschei would want to do that, feel someone else’s tongue with his own, but he understood better when pleasure coursed through him, searing and white-hot.

He tried to pull out of the embrace, mortified, but Koschei’s hands were between his legs, gentle and assured.

“It’s all right,” he whispered, now trailing kisses along the younger boy’s neck. “Let me.”

Theta Sigma couldn’t have protested if his life had depended on it. He closed his eyes, letting the ecstasy consume him, oblivious to everything except the touch of Koschei’s lips and hands. As if from a great distance, he could hear himself making noises: grunting, gasping, and finally crying out as he spent himself. His whole body went slack then, sagging into Koschei’s arms. They were both sweating, enveloped in musky warmth.

The older boy chuckled, nuzzling Theta Sigma’s wet, tangled hair. “Liked that, did you?” he whispered.

Too abashed to speak, Theta Sigma could only nod. He knew about sex, of course; reproductive biology was part of the most basic curriculum, but he could scarcely reconcile those dry, academic lessons with what he felt at this moment.

“Right, it’s my turn,” Koschei said.

“What?” Theta Sigma stammered.

“Like this.” Koschei took the younger boy’s hands and led them downward. Theta Sigma blushed uncontrollably, but ever the tutor, Koschei proved as patient at this as with all his other lessons. Theta Sigma’s awkwardness fell away as Koschei guided him, gasping quiet instructions: “That’s good… that’s right… a bit faster… a little more pressure.” Koschei didn’t make as much noise, just a soft groan at the end.

Afterwards, they made a bed of their clothes and towels, sprawling together on the warm stone ledge, kissing and nuzzling, exploring each other’s bodies until drowsiness overtook them, and they fell into humid, blissful slumber.

(v)

A rustling noise and pressure on the bed awoke the Doctor, and he blinked his way back to the present. The Master sat on the edge of his bed, staring at him, his pupils still partly dilated.

“What?” the Doctor grumbled, rubbing his arm across his forehead, irritated that the dream had been interrupted. Casting a baleful expression at his nemesis, he thought, _I liked you better when you were fifteen_. Memory struck him: Koschei had had two scars, not just one, a thin, shiny white band on the outside of each wrist. The Doctor doubted if anyone else had ever noticed them, but he’d seen Koschei shirtless enough times… he pushed away the thought.

“You were asleep.” Somewhere in the depths of the Master’s gaze, the Doctor saw the barest flicker of his lost friend.

“Yes, obviously.”

“With me in the room.”

“You’re hardly in a state to do any damage.” The Doctor yawned.

“Besides, if anything happened to you, Blue-face would crush my skull with one hand.” The Master’s voice grew soft, seductive. “What were you dreaming about? You looked so peaceful.”

The Doctor sat up, pushing the pillow to the small of his back. “Gallifrey.”

The Master braced his left hand against the mattress, probably to keep himself from falling over. The Doctor couldn’t resist a quick look: no scars, of course.

“How’d you do it?” the Master asked.

“Do what?”

“Destroy the planet.”

Fighting the urge to kick the other Time Lord, the Doctor instead folded his arms and glared. That was one secret he would never, ever give up: not to the Master, not to anyone.

“How’d you survive?” the Master pressed.

“Accident,” the Doctor said. That much he didn’t mind sharing, since the reason for his survival had been so freakish, so mundane. “The planet was breaking up… I thought every second would be the last.” He briefly closed his eyes; he’d re-lived those fateful moments again and again and again. He’d expected to die. In those instants, he’d made peace with himself; he’d been ready for the end, willing to sacrifice himself to keep the Time Lords’ secrets out of the Daleks’ clutches. In a sense, he’d always known his life would end like that: in a pitched battle for the survival of time and space itself. There would be a tremendous explosion, then nothing, eternal silence, annihilation. Oblivion.

“And?”

“The TARDIS broke through the cavern ceiling. Landed right next to me.” The Doctor held out his left arm, demonstrating. “Just like that. I could touch it.” Self-preservation instincts, blind and primitive, had kicked in. “I had the key. I opened the door, stepped inside…”

The Master leaned forward, eager for this part of the story. “And then…?”

“I didn’t have time to dematerialize. The blast threw the ship—so far. I must’ve passed out.” He didn’t tell the Master that he’d been half-dead at the time, his body scorched almost beyond recognition. He hadn’t walked into the TARDIS; he’d crawled, practically sliding on his belly. He ruminated over one particular cat’s whisker of fate. In the last fraction of a second before the final cataclysm, the Doctor had pushed the TARDIS door shut: a simple, everyday act, but one that had made the difference between life and death.

“Then what?”

The Doctor shrugged, retreating behind his emotional armor. “When I came around, the TARDIS was in orbit around some massive planet, and I’d regenerated. Into the last body, not this one.”

“So, the coward survived.”

The Doctor shut his eyes, rumbling with quiet laughter. He laughed and he laughed, then he shook all over, shouting with laughter. He couldn’t resist a certain amount of cruelty, since he now knew how much the Master feared the idea of his enemy laughing at him.

“Shut up!” The Master tried to yell, but in his weakened state, he couldn’t quiet muster the volume.

“Coward,” the Doctor snorted. “I guess that old Earth saying is true: it really does take one to know one.”

“Spare me.”

“You don’t think I’m going to let that one go?” The Doctor’s voice rang with scorn when he said, “You _ran_. You ran to the very end of time and the universe, turned yourself into a human infant, and hid all your Time Lord powers in a pocket watch.” For a moment he touched that cold, black place of rage, his eyes and voice going hard. “Don’t you _dare_ accuse me of cowardice!”

“I _survived_ ,” the Master hissed. “I knew a hopeless situation when I saw one!”

“You _ran_ ,” the Doctor repeated. “You ran, while I stayed and fought and made all the difficult choices. If you think you can lay Gallifrey at my feet, you’re dead wrong.”

The Master stared into middle distance, not meeting the Doctor’s gaze. “I never wanted to be part of that fight,” he said. “I was over, I was… I was finished.” Turning his tormented eyes back to the Doctor, he said, “They ripped me out of death and into life so I could fight _their_ battle! I was in the Eye of Harmony! It was—”   He faltered, then stopped, as if afraid he’d revealed too much pain to his adversary. “Do you have any idea what that was like?”

The Doctor went still for a moment. This was something he’d never considered. He realized now that the Master must have been, in his own strange way, at peace.

“No,” he admitted. “No, I’m sorry; I never thought of that.”

“Of course you didn’t; too busy being the sanctimonious knight up on your high horse!”

Too tired for anger now, the Doctor said, “Why didn’t you wait for me? Daleks were invading Gallifrey; you must have known I’d fight them to the death before I let them take the planet.”

“I didn’t know,” the Master admitted. “You weren’t _there_. Time Lords were dying by the score, and I wasn’t going to wait and see if the great hero would put in an appearance.”

“You could’ve tried making contact.” The Doctor tapped his forehead, indicating telepathy. “I’m sorry they brought you back for such selfish ends, but if the two of us had put our minds together, we might’ve saved the planet.” He sighed, frustrated at his own naïveté. “Listen to me.” Then he asked, “Who brought you back? Romana was president; she never would’ve allowed that.”

“Six other Time Lord, renegades, acting without Romana’s knowledge. They were led by Calixto; you probably never knew him. We’d worked together, back in the old days—he knew me. He told me I was the only one smart enough to develop a weapon—one we could use against the Daleks.”

“What’d they do for your body?” the Doctor asked, curious.

“Some guard who’d died. The body wasn’t too damaged. Of course my genetic material was in the DNA bank… they used it to extract my consciousness from the Eye and force it into the body.” The Master cringed at the memory. “Excruciating.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They said they’d give me a new TARDIS and a new set of regenerations, pardon me for all my crimes, let me free to go anywhere I wanted, as soon as the Daleks were defeated.”

“You believed them?”

“Of course I didn’t,” the Master sneered. “I’m not a gullible cretin, like you!”

“And when you thought the situation was hopeless, you ran off in your new TARDIS.” The Doctor nodded. “Where is it now? Why’d you use my old thing? Even with the coordinates fused, you could’ve gone back to Melcassairo for your own.”

“I would have,” the Master revealed, scowling. “But the Time Lords destroyed it remotely. Fighting to the death against Daleks, and they still bothered with that. I barely had time to use the Chameleon Arch. My adoptive parents said they found me lying in a circle of black ash, the pocket watch next to me.”

The Doctor thought of his own recent experience being human. He wondered if the Master had experienced any dreams, entertained wild fantasies; if Professor Yana had kept his own “Journal of Impossible Things.” He silently blessed those renegade Time Lords: resurrecting the Master had been an act of colossal, if desperate stupidity, but at least they’d had the common sense to destroy a TARDIS that must have been one of the most sophisticated models, far more powerful than the Doctor’s.

The Master gasped then, clutching his head, crying out as the drumming in his mind intensified. This episode was so extreme that the Master collapsed onto his side, doubling up in fetal position and sobbing in agony while he waited for it to stop. The Doctor tried rubbing the back of his neck, thinking to release the tense muscles via pressure points, but nothing worked; he could only watch, hating his own helplessness, and wait for the spell to pass.

At last it ended, leaving the Master weak and wretched. He didn’t complain or protest as the Doctor eased him over into his own bed and covered him up. He lay there shuddering in spasms from time to time until twilight darkened the windows and the doorchimes announced the arrival of the food service staff with dinner. Hours later, most of the meal still lay on the table, uneaten; the Doctor found he had very little appetite.

**To be continued…**


	4. Sympathy for the Devil--Part Four

# Part IV

_Shattered_

As a young Time Lord, the Doctor’s abysmal academy performance had left him unqualified for any kind of sophisticated or exciting projects. Teaching was out of the question—if he’d even had the disposition for it—as was research, exploration, field studies, or the development of new TARDIS prototypes. He’d had no interest in medicine or politics, and certainly no taste for Gallifreyan law. He’d only passed his qualifying exams by the slimmest margin, and without any kind of specialized training, there was almost nothing he could do.

So, like many other underachieving academy students, he’d been assigned to work in the Citadel archives, tediously cataloging every atom of life on Gallifrey. He used to joke that any time a Time Lord broke wind, the event was duly noted in some kind of official record. The job was enough to reduce even the youngest and most robust Time Lord to a dusty stick in a matter of weeks.

To pass the time, he’d spent most of his days delving through the planet’s history, a topic that had bored him terribly as a student, but which he found more interesting when he could pick and choose the topics himself. In this way, he learned about the many planets and societies Time Lords had observed and catalogued. He supposed his initial itch for adventure had its roots in those days, in that quiet subterranean library.

But now, with the planet destroyed and the archives gone, the Doctor found himself plundering his own memories, searching back through those dull, uneventful days, searching for some tiny clue that might give him a hint as to what lay behind that locked door of the Master’s.

At least this walk through the past kept him occupied during the long, difficult night before the final reading. He’d spent well over a century working in that damned archive, and the sheer volume of information he’d processed taxed the limits of even a Time Lord’s memory. In those days, his joy had come not from work but from his small family: his mate and their son, and later, his granddaughter.

The records kept by Gallifreyans were exhaustive, encompassing everything from astral phenomena to geological surveys to the complex taxonomy of every species, living and extinct, on the planet. Some Time Lords had devoted their millennia-long lives to their own language, producing tomes on the topic, lovingly noting every archaic permutation of that marvelous, idiosyncratic tongue. _No wonder they all went mad_. There had been volumes and volumes of Gallifreyan law, detailed architectural plans for every city, the multitude of facts and figures collected for the planetary census—

The Doctor paused in his search through his memories, sensing he’d tripped over something of interest. He returned fully to that drowsy day in the archive, blocking out everything else, since so much of the past would cause him emotional turmoil—the kind of all-encompassing pain that he simply couldn’t afford right now.

The ordinary Gallifreyan lifespan was around three hundred years old, give or take a decade or two. Time Lords, having unlocked the secrets of longevity and bodily renewal, could live easily twice that long in one incarnation, and total lifespans of eight thousand years or more were not uncommon. On a rocky, mountainous planet of finite resources, population control was of paramount importance. All Gallifreyans, at the age of twelve, had microchips implanted under their skin that created temporary sterility, and any couple who wished to produce offspring had to apply to the Population Bureau, often waiting between five and ten years—sometimes longer—before official permission would be granted. After thorough genetic screening, the chips would be removed.

The census reports in the archives interested Theta Sigma on that day because he and his mate had just received word that their genetic tests had shown full compatibility—Time Lords represented less than one percent of Gallifrey’s overall population, but they tended to mate only with each other, so inbreeding represented a constant worry. On that day, he’d been quivering with nervous excitement; once the chips were removed, he and his mate would meet with the young female who’d provide the womb for their infant—Time Ladies never gave birth to their own young; all Time Lords were conceived in vitro and implanted in a surrogate mother who would give birth to and nurse the infant.

For the first time, Theta Sigma had experienced curiosity about his own beginnings, and so he’d scanned back over the population records for the year of his birth. He noted right away that an extraordinary number of children had been born that year—three times as many as in the current year. At first, Theta Sigma thought there must be some mistake, but double-checking showed that the figures were correct. Puzzled now, he began looking back over the years prior to his birth, finding that the high numbers persisted back a decade, two, three, four… for fifty years, Time Lords had been reproducing in, what was for them, prodigious numbers. For the baby boom involved only Time Lords, not members of the technical or manual castes.

Further investigation uncovered the reason why: about fifty years prior to Theta Sigma’s birth, a decree had gone out from the Population Bureau, encouraging Time Lords to bear young. At the time, no official reason had been given, but the strict controls over breeding had been relaxed. Theta Sigma recalled that he’d been one of nearly twenty children in his nursery pod. He cross-referenced the Child Care and Development Bureau records, finding that at present, most nursery pods averaged about ten youngsters. Theta Sigma had been a novice academy student when the Population Bureau had once again clamped down on reproduction, and Time Lord births had slowed to their usual trickle.

The Doctor left his memories, returning to the present. He opened his eyes, staring at the black night that pressed in against the windows of the room. He knew that somehow, this trivial observation must provide a clue. As with the scars on Koschei’s wrists, his mind had zeroed in on something that had seemed a mere curiosity at the time. He recalled discussing the population spike with his mate, and she’d suggested that perhaps the decree had been in response to a bad earthquake that had killed hundreds of Gallifreyans in a city on the planet’s southern hemisphere. That tragedy had claimed the lives of many Time Lords and had occurred about five years prior to the decree from the Population Bureau.

That explanation had made sense to Theta Sigma at the time, and he’d thought no more on it, but now the Doctor wondered. For about sixty years, the Time Lords had reproduced at more than three times their normal rate, surely far exceeding the number who’d perished in the quake. He himself had been a product of that small population boom—as had Koschei. The Doctor turned his head, observing the Master, who lay on his side, his back to the Doctor. At least he was covered up—a desert storm had risen, a cold wind buffeting the thick walls of the hospital.

He wondered for the first time if the Master’s mental illness had some genetic component. Had a weakness in his parents’ DNA been overlooked or even ignored in that baffling push to create more young Time Lords? And why that push in the first place? Why such an imperative to increase the numbers of a people who would live thousands of years? Without even needing to delve into the past, the Doctor recalled his mate’s anger when they’d been told that they could have no more than one child. Later, their son had been told the same thing after Susan’s birth: one child.

The actions of his own species had annoyed and often infuriated him. But this bizarre breeding experiment was just baffling: he could think of no logical reason for it. The Doctor winced, fearing that he might be wasting his time looking through the Master’s memories: what if nothing lay behind that locked jungle door but a tangle of faulty chromosomes?

_No_ , he told himself, that door represented a kind of classic repression: the Master had locked away some dreadful memory and buried it beneath layer upon layer of psychic scar tissue, his personality growing increasingly fractured with each regeneration. Nothing in the behavior of the young Koschei indicated a genetic weakness. The Doctor almost sat bolt upright when he realized Koschei had had no scars on his wrists when he’d looked into the untempered schism. Had he? Or had he not? The Doctor closed his eyes, scanning back over that memory. He paused at the moment when he’d taken the child’s hand. No scars. The Doctor saw that now, plain as day. Koschei had been eight. Two years later, at the age of ten, he’d first met Theta Sigma. Somewhere in the intervening two years something had happened to scar his body—had that same incident, whatever it was, scarred the child’s mind as well?

Frustrated, the Doctor thumped his head on the pillow: he hadn’t known Koschei then, so of course he had no memories of those crucial two years. And Koschei’s youthful stories about his childhood had been unremarkable: his parents had been rank-and-file Time Lords. Theta Sigma had met them a couple of times; nothing in those memories really stood out. At the age of two, Koschei had been placed in one of the Citadel nursery pods, where he’d stayed until his selection into the academy at age eight. His young life hadn’t been much different from that of Theta Sigma and every other young Time Lord.

Again, the Doctor’s thoughts turned to the untempered schism; for the longest time he’d been so certain that looking into the time vortex, glimpsing the awesome vastness of all creation, had triggered the Master’s madness. He himself had been so frightened he’d run away, shrieking. Partly it had been the ceremony itself: the torches, the long hike up into the hills at night, the intimidating majesty of the Time Lords in their full ceremonial regalia. He frowned unhappily, wondering why the adult Time Lords had subjected their sensitive novices to such a frightening experience. The children’s reaction to the schism certainly hadn’t impacted anything in their education. They’d all studied the same curriculum; it wasn’t like they were sorted into different classes based on whether they ran and hid or stood there staring, too paralyzed to move.

All societies had rituals, some random or bizarre or even cruel, and now the Doctor found himself ruminating over the reason for this ceremony. Who had even dreamed it up? Omega, Rassilon? Had it been intended to impress upon novice students the enormity of the things they would learn? The Doctor wondered if he’d stumbled across the origins of the ceremony during his days in the archives. _Only one way to find out_. He pressed his fingers into his temples and plunged once more into the past.

(ii)

He came back to himself sooner than expected, shaken from the trance by pressure on the mattress; a moment later, the Master’s body collided with his. The Doctor exhaled, turning onto his side and smiling faintly as the Master burrowed into him. He adjusted the covers and draped an arm across the Master’s shoulders, taking fastidious care to switch off his sexual reflexes. He didn’t need lust further complicating this emotional morass.

For a while, neither of them spoke. On at least half a dozen occasions on the _Valiant_ , the Master had come creeping out in the small hours, crawling into the Doctor’s dog tent and huddling beside him. He’d made a helpless prisoner of the Doctor, and yet, the Doctor was the one he’d turned to for comfort when the ship fell silent and all the terrors of the night went howling through his mind. In daylight hours, neither of them had ever discussed this, an odd pact between them. The Doctor had spent a large part of that year observing the Master and mentally cataloging his symptoms; those nocturnal visits had provided a lot of grist for analysis.

“Don’t make me do it,” the Master whispered. “Doctor, please; I’ll do anything you want, anything you tell me to.”

The Doctor told him, “I don’t think you’re capable of keeping a promise like that.”

“I will, I swear I will.”

“You’re not acting of your own volition,” the Doctor said, distressed by his old foe’s abject begging. “Most of your life, you’ve been dancing to a beat that someone or something else has been tapping out. You might think you’re in control, but you’re not, far from it.”

“What is it?” the Master said. He was shaking. “What’s behind that door?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s something that happened when you were very young.”

“Childhood trauma?” The Master tried to sneer, but it didn’t work.

“It makes sense. Whatever it was, your mind couldn’t cope with it.” Gentling his voice, the Doctor said, “We’ll find out tomorrow.”

The Master whimpered, “I’m scared.”

“I’ll be there,” the Doctor said. “No matter what it was, no matter how awful, remember that.” Rubbing the Master’s shoulder, he said, “Don’t you want this over with?”

“You think finding out whatever’s behind that door will stop the drums?”

“I know it will. I think the drumming’s a cover for whatever happened to you. When you face it, when you confront it, it’ll stop.”

The Master asked bluntly, “Was I raped?”

“I don’t think so.” This ugly thought had already occurred to the Doctor, but he’d rejected it.

“Why not?”

“Because when we…” Trying—and failing—to keep his tone neutral, he asked, “Was I your first?”

The Master’s voice broke when he said, “Yes.”

“It was always very… well, normal.” A blush crept up the Doctor’s face, and he was grateful for the darkness. “You never acted wounded; you didn’t have…” He sighed. “I don’t know. Hang-ups. Trust issues.” He tried not to dwell on those wonderful nights when Koschei would join him in his narrow bed. “Whatever happened to you, I don’t think it was sexual.” The Master’s perversions in that department had developed later, along with the rest of his immorality.

“Then what? You must have some idea.”

The Doctor said, “Do you remember looking into the untempered schism?”

“Of course.”

“How’d you react?”

“You know; you saw it in my mind. Why are you asking?”

“I want to hear it in your own words.”

“I looked into the time vortex… all that time and space…” The Master’s voice grew distant. “Amazing. Just the most amazing… clarity. That’s what I remember most.”

“You weren’t afraid?”

“Not remotely.” A simple statement of fact, not a boast.

“What’d the other Time Lords do afterwards? Did they say anything? Tell you anything?”

“No, we went back down the hill and I went to sleep in the dormitory. Why?”

The Doctor said, “How long do you suppose the Time Lords conducted that ritual?”

“What?”

“Did you ever learn how old the ceremony was?”

“No,” the Master snorted. “Why should I have cared about something so arcane?”

“Because it wasn’t arcane. It wasn’t some ancient Time Lord secret rite, going back eons, to the age of Omega. Nothing like that. It was, at best, about fifty years old.”

Now the Master showed genuine astonishment. “That can’t be right! Everyone had to—they must have!”

“Did your parents ever tell you about it?”

“They wouldn’t have—it was a secret.”

“No, it wasn’t. We always talked about it at the academy, especially when we were new students, remember? The big hazing ritual. The teachers never forbade us from talking about it. It was common knowledge.”

“So, what are you getting at?”

“Our parents never went through it.”

Uncertain now, the Master said, “How do you know? Did they tell you?”

“No, I found out on my own, when I worked in the Citadel archives. I was just going back now, looking over those memories. When I worked at the archives, Lady Alula died—she was in her last body when she was our teacher. I archived her research, her writings—nothing spectacular, but she used to keep notes on all the young students, so I dug back to see what she’d said about me, about you. And then I kept going back, curious about the students who’d come before us. She always noted how novices reacted to the untempered schism. Fifty years before we were born, she made reference to ‘our new ritual.’ The students before then didn’t go through it.”

“And you think this is important?”

“Around that same time, the president encouraged Time Lords to start having children. The Time Lord birth rate tripled. About sixty years after that, when we were both still novices, the birth rate dropped back to normal. We were part of the only baby boom ever known to Time Lord society. And a few years after we’d both left the academy, the schism ritual was quietly phased out. When my son started the academy, he didn’t go through it.”

The Master connected the pieces readily enough. “So the Time Lords were breeding children and testing them systematically by making them look into the time vortex?”

“Yes.”

The Master shifted. “What were they looking for? Some special quality—intelligence, imagination?”

“I don’t know. Alula never said why in her writings.”

“You think they found what they were looking for in me?”

“I’d put money on it.”

“And whatever it is, it’s behind that door?”

“I think so.”

The Master whispered, “What’d they do to me?”

“We’ll find out.”

A kind of ominous silence descended over them. The Master huddled against the Doctor, trembling. Whatever had happened to Koschei, they both knew it had to have been horrific for the Master to have buried the experience behind such elaborate defenses.

“I don’t want to know.”

“You have to,” the Doctor said, “or the pain in your head is going to destroy you. Come on,” he encouraged, “you’ve always had phenomenal willpower—look how long you’ve survived. If you can do that, you can face down this boogeyman, whatever it is.”

The Master shook his head. “I’m not like you.”

The Doctor couldn’t help a tiny moment of triumph. Such a small step, but the Master had at the very least admitted his essential cowardice, his tendency to run rather than to make a stand and fight.

“You can do it,” he said. “I know you can.” He turned slightly and added, “You need to rest. Here—just lean against me and sleep.” The Master hesitated, and the Doctor said, “After all this, don’t you trust me?”

The Master didn’t answer, but he did shift onto his side, and they spooned together, much as they had in their student days. The Doctor kept a protective arm around the Master, resting his head in the crook of that lovely, strong neck, inhaling the ineffable scent of another Time Lord. Thus entwined, they both fell into slumber, joined for the moment in this unlikely truce.

(iii)

Near dawn, the Doctor surfaced back to consciousness, aware of a growing apprehension inside him. Today was the day. He was almost as frightened as the Master, his fear mainly driven by the knowledge that opening the jungle door might not cure the Master at all. Worse, it might cure him but not change his fundamental personality. He might emerge from the experience as cruel and destructive as ever, but now capable of completely rational thought, his anger and hatred fueled by knowledge of whatever the Time Lords had done to him. His mind might well be so far gone that the grieving and forgiveness necessary for true healing would be beyond him.

The Doctor knew he could always enact his contingency plans—imprison the Master for all time in the TARDIS. He hated that thought; he wanted the Master to be cured and free, capable once again of love and compassion. The Doctor grimaced, knowing too well his own motivations in all this: he didn’t want to be alone. He wanted a long-lived companion at his side, forever, one who shared his culture, his history, his frame of reference. He especially ached for the innocent love he and Koschei had once shared. He stared dry-eyed up at the ceiling. More than anything, he wanted his friend back. He shifted his gaze to the Master’s head. _You’re still in there, somewhere_.

The windstorm had died down during the past few hours. In the absolute silence of the room, the Doctor could hear the hushed whisper of his own blood through his circulatory system, the thudding, dual rhythm of his hearts. If he listened more closely, he could hear the slower thump of the Master’s hearts: the other Time Lord still slept deeply, curled on his side. The Doctor frowned for a moment, then listened more carefully. Was it possible he’d overlooked something so blindingly, idiotically obvious that it had been staring him in the face for months—and the Master far longer than that?

Healthy Gallifreyan hearts always beat together in perfect synchrony. Listening to both of them, the essential rhythm sounded no different from the _lub-dup_ of a single-hearted species. One of the first symptoms of illness—or age—was the increasing asynchrony of that beating. Near the end of his initial body’s lifespan, the Doctor had experienced a lot of uncomfortable arrhythmia, which had worsened as he’d grown ever closer to that first regeneration. He’d known what was coming, and it had frightened him to undergo such a life-altering event without the support of other Time Lords. During the year on the _Valiant_ , his artificially aged hearts had been completely out of whack, causing much of his infuriating weakness. In both experiences, the hearts had created a sound more akin to _lub-lub-dup-dup_. Not exactly the rat-a-tat-tat that the Master heard, but oddly close.

The Doctor also remembered that at the end of his first body’s life, one heart had beaten more strongly than the other, as if to compensate for the weakness of its mate. In those days, the rhythm had been _lub-lub-dup- **dup**_ , with the strongest beat on the last of the four—eerily identical to the Master’s rat-a-tat- _tat_ , where the emphasis also fell on the fourth beat.

He shifted minutely in the bed, leaning down and lightly putting his ear to the Master’s ribcage. From this angle, he heard the Master’s right heart distinctly, the left one creating an echo. Not quite the drumming rhythm, but close enough. The Master’s body was young, his hearts strong and healthy. The Doctor imagined what those same hearts might sound like in an older body.

Slowly he lowered himself back down, resting his head on the pillow, flabbergasted that he’d never considered this before. The drums weren’t drums at all—they were hearts. The real question now was: whose?

The Doctor ran through a roster of the Time Lords who’d instructed novices at Prydon Academy. Again and again, he came back to Lady Alula. Lady Alula, the head of all novice students, in her thirteenth and final incarnation during Theta Sigma’s and Koschei’s early days at the academy. Lady Alula, who had so meticulously kept records of every novice’s reaction to peering into the untempered schism.

(iv)

In the examining room later that morning, the Master made no pretense of trying to hide his fear. After using the loo, he lay back in the chair, eyes wild, his breathing unsteady. He didn’t fight the injection, afterwards tightly clutching the Doctor’s hands. The Doctor sat with him, saying nothing, their fingers laced together; he relished these quiet moments of trust. Sweat darkened the Master’s tunic; he stank of fear, but he seemed to take a small measure of comfort from the Doctor’s presence. At last, when the drug had taken effect, the Doctor let go of his hands and found the contact points on either side of his head.

He located Koschei in the jungle almost right away—this time, the Master had made no efforts to hide his younger self. The boy waited near the door, hugging himself and trembling.

“It’s all right,” the Doctor said, reaching out to take the child’s hands.

“Will it be over after this?” Koschei inquired, face taut.

“I promise,” the Doctor said. He scooted down to give the boy a reassuring hug. “Listen to me, Koschei. I know whatever’s behind that door is terrifying, but I promise you this: you won’t be alone in there. I’ll be right next to you. Whatever you see, whatever happens, I’m there. All right?”

“Yes,” Koschei whispered.

“Come on, then,” the Doctor said, not wanting to waste time; he didn’t think he could endure another round of this emotional flaying. “You’re a brave, smart little boy.”

Hand in hand, they approached the door. For a moment, the Doctor wondered what to do about those thick, ominous-looking tree roots, but Koschei had already figured this out. He bent down, grabbed a root with his hands, and said, “Go away.”

The roots shimmered and vanished. Now the door lay naked and exposed, a brutish, ugly little thing. Was it the Doctor’s imagination, or did he see the shapes of grotesque creatures in the grain of the wood?

“Now, the key,” he said, trying not to let fear shake his focus or resolve.

Koschei drew out the key from beneath his tunic. Without pulling the chain over his head, he scooted down and inserted the iron key into the tiny lock.

With a grate of rusty metal, the key turned. Koschei knelt back, pulling the key from the lock. He gave a push with one hand, and the door swung inward with a funny popping noise, like a cork from a bottle.

“It’s dark in there,” he quavered.

“Yes, I thought it would be. But you’ll need to go first.”

“No,” the boy squirmed.

“Yes,” the Doctor insisted. “I’ll be right behind you. If I go first, it’ll be too easy for you not to follow me. Besides, you need to go first, to conquer another fear.”

Koschei took a deep breath. He tucked the key back under his tunic, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled through the door.

The Doctor realized immediately the size of the opening was going to present a problem, so he shucked out of his long coat, shifted his sonic screwdriver and TARDIS key to his trouser pockets, and removed his jacket and necktie. As unencumbered as possible, he lay flat on his belly and began wiggling through the doorway.

“Koschei?” he called.

“I’m here.” The voice came faintly from up ahead.

“Wait where you are—it’s a bit of a tight fit for me.” The Doctor silently blessed the narrow frame of this incarnation: he didn’t think any of his previous bodies could have squeezed through that doorway. As it was, he had to pull in his shoulders, pushing himself forward with the tips of his toes. The tunnel was like an animal burrow: confining, dark, claustrophobic.

Without warning, the tunnel opened up into a dimly lit corridor of smooth, pale walls. Astonished at this abrupt change, the Doctor stood. He’d been expecting some horrid chamber full of strangling tree roots, deep in the bowels of the earth, but instead, he found himself standing in a corridor that could have come from nearly any building on Gallifrey.

Koschei waited outside another door, eyes glassy, breathing shallow. A soft light illuminated the edges of the doorframe, and from behind it, the Doctor could hear the sound of faint voices.

“This is it?” he asked the boy, dumbfounded by how banal, how ordinary it all appeared. “In here?”

Koschei mouthed the word, “Yes.” He seemed to have lost the ability to speak.

The Doctor took the small, clammy hand in his. “Go on,” he said, his mouth parched. “Open it.”

The boy cringed, as if anticipating a physical blow. Then he reached up and tapped the button that would open the door.

(v)

The Doctor counted eight Time Lords in the room, a curious scientific lab. They stood waiting at a series of monitors, an atmosphere of tension hanging over the proceedings. All eight wore everyday robes and close-fitting head coverings rather than ornate ceremonial robes and heavy scapulars. The Doctor’s eyes darted quickly from face to face: there were four Time Lords and four Time Ladies. Based on the colors of their robes, all five colleges of the academy were represented: Patrexes, Arcalian, Prydonian, Dromeian, and Cerulean. Prydon Academy was represented by Lord Borusa and Lady Alula. The Doctor’s hearts compressed when he recognized Lord Goth—later Chancellor Goth, one of the Doctor’s adversaries.

The object of their attention—connected by a preponderance of cables and wires to the computer banks—was a grotesque contraption, half sophisticated medical apparatus and half medieval torture device. In the center of this thing, Koschei hung suspended, eyes bulging with terror, fighting desperately against the restraints that held his arms over his head. He’d already chafed his skin raw, drops of blood trickling down his arms, staining the sleeves of his tunic. A strange, glowing fiber-optic circlet had been fitted over his head.

The entire device was enclosed in clear casing, continuous with the ceiling above it and with the smooth, blank wall it faced. Something about the wall’s appearance jogged an unpleasant recent memory, and the Doctor gagged back a taste like bile.

In the ceiling over Koschei’s head, a circular window opened to the night sky; the Doctor realized the lab must be on the upper level of a building.

Borusa paced around the device, looking upward, eyes gleaming with both fear and anticipation.

“It’s ready,” he said, and the Doctor realized he was in charge of this entire operation. The other seven Time Lords moved to their stations, as if they’d been practicing for this moment in drills. “Now!”

Lady Alula touched a button, and the glow of the fiber-optic circlet increased to a deep pulsating orange. Koschei cried out, but the Time Lords ignored him. A brilliant light shone up from his head into the night sky. _Almost like a particle attraction beam_ , the Doctor thought, but the humming resonance was all wrong. He realized the Time Lords were using Koschei as some kind of magnet.

A thundering, horrible bellow from above made the Doctor begin sweating in a great, slick wave. His guts churned: he knew that voice.

“No,” moaned, cringing. “Oh, no!”

A monstrous creature appeared, drawn down through the opening in the ceiling, pulled through the orange beam toward Koschei’s body. The thing was scaly and horned, its eyes black flame, its multitude of teeth jagged and razor-sharp. Somehow its enormous size had been compressed; it shrieked, then shimmered and grew transparent, then vanished like a ghost through the top of Koschei’s head.

The boy’s entire body arched, his eyes searing with infernal red fire. A rash of black writing appeared on his skin: indecipherable characters. The Doctor’s blood ran cold when he recognized that script. Koschei screamed, a torrent of vomit gushing from his mouth; he simultaneously voided waste, stains darkening his white trousers.

“Goth, _now_!” Borusa shouted.

Goth threw a lever. In the smooth white wall, an opening appeared, beyond which lay utter blackness: the void.

Koschei screamed and screamed, the child’s cries mingling with the enraged bellows of the monster inside him. Then the beast came tearing out through the boy’s chest in a blaze of red light. It tumbled through the vacuum and vanished into the blackness of hell. In his restraints, Koschei sagged, a stream of bile dribbling from his mouth.

Overhead, a second demon appeared, as repulsive as the first. The same ghastly process was repeated: it vanished into Koschei’s head and a moment or two later came ripping out of his chest, tumbling helplessly into the void.

The Doctor stared up at the ceiling, quaking and aghast: _how many more were there?_

_Hundreds_ , he realized. Then, to his horror, _No, thousands_.

He couldn’t go back in time and rewrite history. He couldn’t crawl into that brutal contraption and free Koschei. He could do only one thing: he shut his eyes and projected his own consciousness into Koschei’s mind.

Inside, he found hell: fear and torment beyond imagining. The Doctor had suffered this once before, at the hands of Sutekh the Destroyer, and now he found himself stricken, reliving that horror, but he forced himself to call out to Koschei: _I’m here_!

_Doctor!_ the boy screamed.

_I’m here; I’m right here!_ With a force of monumental effort, the Doctor wedged himself into the pain receptors of the boy’s consciousness. He couldn’t stop Koschei’s suffering completely, but he took the brunt of it, bearing agony unlike anything he’d ever known. Wave after wave burned through him; lighting and molten lava were piffling trifles in contrast. Millions of razor blades seemed to shred his flesh into ribbons. Every moment that he feared he couldn’t bear more or was tempted to stop, to let go, he reminded himself that for an innocent child, the torture would be a million times more excruciating.

Fearing he’d lose his own sanity trying to save the boy, the Doctor turned to the one thing he’d always believed in: his friends. He began chanting their names out loud, from Susan all the way to Martha. At first his voice shook and he could barely focus, but the very names brought back memories, and he gained strength as the steadfast love of his friends poured into him, giving him courage to endure. He could sense each one of them, even though most were lost to him forever, feel the essence of their life-forces, each unique individual spark, the power of their belief in him and his belief in them.

He lost all sense of time as he chanted, shielding Koschei from the demons as best he could and drawing strength from his memories to help him endure the ceaseless horror. The torment went on and on and on—hours, days, months, years? The Doctor couldn’t tell; he only knew he had to hold himself together and protect Koschei.

Then, without warning, the demonic energy drained away as the last entity passed through Koschei’s body and into the void. The Doctor seemed to fall out of the boy’s mind as if from a great distance, landing back in his own body, which promptly collapsed to the laboratory floor, lying beside the contraption like a bundle of wet rags. In the restraints, Koschei hung motionless. The Doctor watched as the Time Lords shut down the power to the vile device.

“It worked.” Lord Goth spoke in a hushed voice. He circled around the machine, stepping through the Doctor, who of course was invisible to him.

“Was that all of them?” asked Lady Alula, her voice unsteady.

Borusa checked a monitor. “Yes, I believe it was. A million.” Through the circular opening in the ceiling, the Doctor could see dawn breaking. The process of trapping all of the million demons had taken the entire night. “The void is sealed: they’re trapped.” For a moment, Borusa clutched onto the console for support, wiping his face. He’d aged, the Doctor realized. Everyone in the room looked like they’d aged a decade overnight.

The eight Time Lords shook hands with each other, as if congratulating themselves on some heroic feat. Then they set about dismantling the equipment. As the Doctor watched, Lady Alula opened a panel in the device, wrinkling her nose at the stench. She reached in, her fingers making a clinical, dispassionate examination of Koschei’s neck. She grunted with surprise, and drew something from a pocket in her robe: a syringe full of pale yellow fluid.

“What are you doing?” Borusa’s voice, clear and strong, floated across the room.

“He’s still breathing, Lord Borusa,” she told him, holding up hypodermic. “Acetylsalicylic acid, as we agreed.”

“He’s alive?” Borusa circled over swiftly, putting his hand to the boy’s neck, then his nose. “By Omega.” He turned to the two youngest Time Lords in the room. “Have him cleaned and taken to medical.”

“No!” Lady Alula stared at him, aghast. “Borusa, you promised before we started that the child would be destroyed if by some miracle it survived. We all agreed to that!”

Borusa was smiling, half to himself. “He’s young and resilient. He won’t remember any of this—I’ll see to that. A few days in medical, and he’ll be good as new.”

“Lord Borusa!” One of the younger Time Ladies approached. “You can’t do this—if he remembers—sir, we’re acting entirely outside the Ethics Commission. Even the president said that if we’re discovered, she knows nothing about this.”

“He won’t remember.” Affectionately, Borusa touched Koschei’s sweat-soaked curls. “He’s such an intelligent child—it would be a shame for all his gifts to go to waste.”

“Lord Borusa, this child is _damaged_ ,” Lady Alula insisted. “It might not show on the surface, but he’ll never be whole after this—there’s no telling how much of his brain has been indelibly altered. We can’t possibly train him as a Time Lord, giving him the most powerful knowledge in the universe. He could become incredibly dangerous! Lord Borusa, please don’t do something so foolish!”

Borusa seemed already to have made up his mind. He glanced around at the other seven, whose expressions reflected varying degrees of fear and irritation. The Doctor could see the younger Time Lords weighing the consequences of supporting Borusa versus defying him, and he felt sickened—but not surprised—that not one of them took into account Koschei’s well-being. Indeed, the physical and mental health of an innocent child seemed to be the last thing any of them was considering.

With a polite smile, Borusa said, “Since we seem to be at an impasse, I’ll defer to the most senior among us. Lord Goth? What would you advise?”

Goth had come to stand at the device, also reaching in to examine Koschei’s vital signs. “He must have amazing physiology and willpower to survive that experience. I say it’s a shame to squander such strength. The child could still be an asset. Let’s get him into medical and see how he recovers. If he shows signs of instability, we still have the option of termination.”

Borusa couldn’t resist shooting a victorious look at the other seven Time Lords. Lady Alula, evidently deciding she’d heard enough, slapped the hypodermic into his hand.

“On your own head be it, then,” she said, and stalked out of the laboratory.

(vi)

The Doctor recovered enough strength to crab-crawl out of the laboratory, where he slouched against a wall, pulling deep breaths. Koschei was nowhere to be seen. He closed his eyes, concentrating, reaching out to the boy. At last he found the weak throb of the child’s life essence and willed himself toward it.

Koschei stood leaning against a wall of an enclosed medical room. The Doctor took a spot beside him. He could see that outside the door, a guard had been posted. Koschei watched his other self, lying in the bed. The boy had been cleaned up and dressed in a hospital gown, and now he lay beneath a warming blanket, his vital signs flicking on a nearby monitor. His skin was waxen, completely without color, eyes sunken in dark circles, lips parched from dehydration. An IV line taped into one arm dripped fluids down into his body, and his wrists were heavily bandaged.

The Doctor looked down at the boy beside him, seeing again those faint white scars, the only outward sign of the ordeal Koschei had endured.

The door swooshed open, and in strode Borusa, cleaned up and looking pleased with himself. He examined the boy, then leaned across his body to adjust the monitor, his chest brushing against Koschei’s ear. When he drew back, the Doctor could see the long lashes fluttering, the eyes half-dead, but burning. In that inferno, the Master was born.

The eyes closed then, and the boy slept. Lord Borusa briefly put his fingertips on the boy’s temples, putting a block on Koschei’s memories of the event. Later, the boy would probably be told only that he’d fallen ill. Borusa nodded, satisfied, then turned and left.

“That’s where the drums came from,” Koschei whispered. “His hearts.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said, glancing down at him. “His old hearts. That’s why the rhythm is wrong. He regenerated a few years later.”

“And these.” Koschei touched his scars.

“Yes.”

The boy’s mouth worked, and his eyes filled up. “Can I go home now?”

“Of course,” the Doctor said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Where does home feel like right now?”

The boy concentrated, and a moment later, they stood back in the fantasy-nursery, which looked much as it had when they’d left it. A fire crackled in the grate, the toys still lay on the hearth rug. On a small table lay a plate of biscuits and a glass of milk. Koschei sat down and began to eat.

“Better?” The Doctor did his best to smile.

“Mmm-hmm.” Koschei yawned, rubbing fists into his eyes. The Doctor scooped him up. A rocking chair appeared out of nowhere, and the Doctor sat in it, the boy in his lap. Koschei put his head on the Doctor’s shoulder, and the Time Lord rocked back and forth, gently massaging the child’s back and humming the melody of some long-forgotten Gallifreyan lullaby.

“I can’t hear the drums anymore,” the boy murmured.

“Neither can I. They’re gone, now.”

“Forever?”

“Yes, forever.”

“Can I go to sleep now?”

“Yes, of course,” the Doctor said.

“Will you stay here with me?”

“Of course I will.”

“Is it all right to dream?”

“You can dream about anything you want.” The Doctor lifted the boy and settled him into the small bed, tucking the blankets in around his shoulders. Koschei turned onto his side, pulling the teddy bear against him. The Doctor stayed there, rubbing the child’s back, until at last the blue eyes closed, and Koschei drifted off into slumber. He didn’t move; he just sat waiting until the dreamscape darkened and blurred and he was once again back in his present-day body, back in the examination room.

Vamana looked aghast, sickened, her normal composure deeply shaken.

In the chair, the Master was unconscious, tears still slowly draining down his face. The hair at his temples had gone snow-white. The entire front of his tunic was soaked wet.

The Doctor lowered his arms and stood. Beneath his feet, the floor tilted alarmingly. He bolted for the lavatory but didn’t quite make it, collapsing to his knees, retching, the contents of his stomach spewing out onto the smooth gray floor.

**To be continued…**


	5. Sympathy for the Devil--Part Five

Part V

_Fool to Cry_

The memory of his ordeal at the hands of Sutekh slammed into the Doctor, and he toppled onto his side, doubled up and screaming, re-living every moment in vivid, monstrous detail.

A moment later, hands touched his head, and he felt Vamana’s presence in his mind. With her aid, he wrestled the memory back into its prison cell, closing and bolting the door. He knew the memory was there, but he always avoided taking it out and examining it; in exposing the Master’s demons, he’d inadvertently let loose his own.

The scent of something cool and minty slipped up into his nostrils, and he breathed deeply: essence of wintergreen. The fog in his mind cleared, and his roiling stomach ceased its pitching and heaving.

“Sorry about the mess,” he apologized as Vamana drew him upright.

“Think nothing of it.” She asked, “Can you stand?”

“I think so.” He tried his legs: shaky, but they’d hold him.

Attendants were already loading the Master onto a gurney.

Vamana touched the Doctor’s shoulder. “You have extraordinary courage, Time Lord.”

The Doctor didn’t feel courageous. He felt sick, terribly ashamed that Vamana had witnessed the depravities of his species.

“Perhaps you’d like to spend some time in the greenhouse? It’s quite peaceful up there.”

“Yes,” the Doctor agreed. He told the attendants, “Please put some extra towels in our room. And, all things considered, some of that wintergreen and a bucket.”

(ii)

He exited the lift at the top floor, wandering out into the humid greenhouse, inhaling the scent of healing herbs. He could see at once why Vamana had recommended the place; already he felt refreshed, stronger. At one of the big windows, he stared out over the expanse of endless desert, reminded of the day Koschei had shown him the Citadel from the upper level of Prydon Tower.

He could scarcely begin to process the things he’d seen in the Master’s memories. The Doctor had suspected something dire must lay behind that jungle door, but nothing he’d imagined had been even a shadow of the reality.

One emotion burned through him, searing everything in its wake: anger. _How could they?_ barely began to cover it. The deliberate plans, the dispassionate execution of them. He remembered it was Borusa who’d once chided him, _Perhaps you should remember your training in detachment!_ The Doctor wondered of his old mentor, _Is that what you did? Did your detachment allow you to breed a child so you could brutally torture him eight years later?_

A few questions remained unanswered. Not that it made a bit of difference now, but the Doctor felt the need nevertheless to satisfy his curiosity. The full truth might also help the Master; understanding might lead to acceptance and healing. The Doctor settled himself on a seat nearby and slipped into a trance state.

(iii)

He didn’t linger long in the past, aware of the time and wanting to be downstairs when the Master awoke. He got back in the lift and went down a few stories, but when he got out, he found himself wandering in haphazard circles.

“Sorry, I seem to be lost,” he said when he found the nearest attendant. “My room’s on level 327.”

“I’ll bring you down—just a moment.”

The attendant turned her attention to a blinking monitor. Nearby on the counter lay a box full of small, rather flat jars. Ever curious, the Doctor picked one up, reading the label on the white plastic. His eyebrows shot up, and before the attendant turned back, he casually slid the jar inside the sleeve of his tunic. If she noticed anything odd about him, she gave no sign, escorting him to the lift and activating it via retinal scan.

“I’ve programmed it for level 327,” she said with a smile. “You’re all set.”

“Thanks,” the Doctor responded, stepping into the lift. He sighed with relief when the door closed, keeping the jar inside his sleeve until he returned to his own room, where he took it out and looked it over.

_Pretty nervy_ , snarked a voice inside his head, but he ignored it, tucking the jar under his pillow. He argued back, _Best to be prepared…_

The Master lay in the second bed, heavily covered, still sleeping off the effects of the sedative. The staff had left a pail near his bed; wintergreen and a few clean hand towels had been placed on the table. Rather than lie on his own bed, the Doctor slipped beneath the covers on the right side of the Master, pressing himself against the other Time Lord’s body. He winced at how cold the Master felt, as if all heat and life had left his body.

Now, he could only wait. He knew the drumming had stopped, but that might well be the only thing that had changed. He so badly wanted things to be different between them. The Master was the only other Time Lord in existence, and the Doctor couldn’t bear the thought of them perpetually at each other’s throats. But after what he’d done on Earth, there was no way the Doctor could let his wily old adversary run free. Either he would mend his ways or he’d be a prisoner forever.

Staring down at the Master’s face, the Doctor thought, _It’s up to you. It’s your choice to make_.

He dozed for a while, tired, but he kept jerking awake, unwilling to let himself drift off; he feared the nightmares that lurked in the dark recesses of his mind.

Some time later, thrashing limbs told him the Master would soon wake up. The Doctor sat, reaching down for the pail and a towel, holding them ready.

The Master came to in an abrupt rush, his eyes bugging out. He gagged, struggling to sit. The Doctor pushed him upright, sticking the pail in front of him. With an almighty retch, the Master began to heave, bringing up everything in a torrent of bile. The Doctor kept an arm around him, holding him steady, while the Master puked up seemingly several lifetime’s worth of evil.

When the other Time Lord had emptied his stomach completely, the Doctor held the essence of wintergreen under his nose. The heaving spasms passed; the Master was sweating, icy sheets drenching his skin. The Doctor wiped his face with one of the towels. Beneath his arm, the Master shook in violent tremors.

“Shh,” the Doctor said, setting aside the pail. He drew the Master close, murmuring, “It’s all right; it’s over now.”

The Master let out a strangled groan, and at last the tears came, a great saline flood. He tried to twist away, mortified, but the Doctor wouldn’t allow it, and he pulled the Master against himself. The other Time Lord struggled for a few wild moments, but then his resistance crumbled, his body went slack, and he allowed himself to be comforted. They toppled back against the pillows, the Master sprawled half on top of the Doctor, crying in hammering, convulsive sobs. The Doctor kept one arm tightly around the Master’s quaking ribs, stroking the round head with his free hand. He didn’t say anything, just let the Master cry everything out, hoping some of the poison would be washed away.

Without lifting his head, the Master gasped, “I—was—so—scared!”

“Shh,” the Doctor whispered, but the Master went on.

“They wouldn’t—wouldn’t stop.”

“I know,” the Doctor whispered.

“It hurt.” The Master gasped out the most fundamental indignity. “It _hurt_!” He let out another heartrending cry and sobbed so hard the Doctor feared he’d break apart. He held on, though, drawing on every reserve of emotional strength he possessed, imagining himself as a rock or a tree trunk, something stalwart and solid, anchored to the earth.

Only when the Master began to hyperventilate did the Doctor find pressure points in his back, digging into them with his fingertips. His chest muscles relaxed, and the Master gasped, forced to take deeper breaths. The Doctor began rocking his body in small, gentle movements, rubbing the Master’s back, murmuring a quiet, meaningless vocalization. In gradual stages, the Master began to settle down, still gasping and sniffling. Now the Doctor visualized water, a cool, soothing stream, wishing he could physically pour love into the other Time Lord. In his most dreadful moments of fear, pain, or despair, the Doctor could draw on the love of others, but the Master had lived too long with anger and hatred and cynicism, and he possessed no such emotional reserves.

The maelstrom continued to abate. The Master’s eyes closed; his limbs twitched. He gasped and flailed, fighting sleep. The Doctor shifted position slightly, so that the Master’s head lay on the pillow, and he drew up the covers more snugly.

“Shh,” he whispered, kissing the Master’s forehead. “Sleep, Koschei. It’s safe now. I’m right here.”

After a few more moments of struggle, exhaustion overwhelmed the Master, and he dropped off. Curled on his side, he looked startlingly as he had in that dreamscape nursery, a weary child at the end of a long ordeal. The Doctor watched him sleep. Despite the turbulence, he was dry-eyed. The tears, he suspected, would come later. Then he lay back against the second pillow and shut his eyes, surrendering to blackness.

(iv)

Later that afternoon, the Master began struggling once again toward wakefulness. This time, the Doctor lay quietly, not doing or saying anything. The Master sat, flung back the covers, and walked on unsteady legs into the bathroom.

Earlier, the Doctor had set a clean hospital uniform in the bathroom, and it didn’t surprise him when he heard the shower start to run. He stretched, then went over to his own bed, sitting with his back to the wall, waiting. Outside the windows, the sky’s color shifted abruptly from blue to purple. It had been one hell of a day.

At the moment, he felt more apprehensive since he’d left Earth with the Master. Now was the time of reckoning. He knew it was possible all his efforts on the Master’s behalf might come to nothing, and he feared that the Master would hate him even more after this. The Doctor had seen his enemy young, weak, defenseless, horribly violated, sick, weeping, catatonic with grief and fear—vulnerabilities that the Master had probably, in the past, committed murder to keep hidden.

The water stopped running, and the Master emerged a few minutes later, hair damp, dressed in a clean tunic and trousers. He went back to his own bed, then stopped, staring down: the rumpled sheets bore large wet spots from where he’d been crying, and bile splattered the blankets. He turned and glanced at the Doctor, then back at his bed again.

“I liked it better when you were in it,” he sulked.

The Doctor wiggled over and touched the spot next to him. He said nothing. The Master would need complete emotional re-conditioning; if he wanted affection, he would have to seek it out, even if it meant venturing onto someone else’s territory.

The sorry condition of the bed made up the Master’s mind. He inched over to the Doctor’s bed and sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress, staring at a spot somewhere between the table and window.

“How’s your head?” the Doctor asked.

“Quiet,” the Master said, not looking at him. “Almost too quiet. This’ll take some getting used to.”

“Stomach?”

The Master put a hand to the base of his sternum, inhaling and exhaling. “Raw.”

The Doctor made a sympathetic noise, but he said nothing.

The Master swallowed a few times, as if unwilling to speak, but at last his need for knowledge got the better of him.

“Those things—what were they?”

“Demons,” the Doctor told him, talking to the back of his head. “Real demons, from before time, before the universe. Possibly the first and most ancient race, the most powerful. The physical embodiment of pure, undiluted evil.”

“Are any still out there?” The Master’s hand jerked in a slight, sideways motion.

“They’re in the void. The Time Lords thought they got all of them, but two were already trapped and couldn’t be drawn in. One had possessed an Osiran named Sutekh, and he became Sutekh the Destroyer, so the other Osirans imprisoned him in a pyramid on Mars. I mentioned him in the TARDIS on the way here, and you had a strange reaction, as if you subconsciously recognized the name. The Great Beast was the other one—he was imprisoned at the center of the planet Krop Tor, in perpetual orbit around a black hole.”

“Are they still trapped?”

“No, they’re dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I killed them.”

The Master’s head turned at this calm pronouncement, and he stared at the Doctor, not knowing whether to believe him or not.

“You.”

“Yes. Me.”

The Master snorted. “What do you do for an encore?”

The Doctor told him, softly, “I win.”

The Master shifted, angling his body so that he could sit face-to-face with the Doctor. His expressions hadn’t changed much, though his usual anger had been blunted.

“Were we at war with them? Is that why the Time Lords trapped them?”

“No. We were at war with some of the other ancient races—the great vampires, the Racnoss—but not the demons. We couldn’t have fought the demons; they were too powerful. They had to be exiled.”

“Had they threatened Gallifrey?”

“No, never.”

“Then _why_?”

“You haven’t figured that out?”

“Because the Time Lords couldn’t stand the existence of a more powerful species?”

How well the Master knew his own race. “Yes,” the Doctor said. “That’s it exactly. The demons were almost omniscient, and the Time Lords couldn’t abide the thought of another species threatening their monopoly on time and space. So they devised a plan for trapping the demons in the one place they never could escape: the void.”

The Master processed this, a thousand questions flashing through his eyes. The Doctor propped his second pillow against the wall and said, “Here, lean against this.” The Master was still weak and shaky.

The other Time Lord ignored the invitation. “Why not one of them—if the bastards were so hell-bent on trapping those demons, why not do it themselves?”

“They tried. It didn’t work. They might’ve snared one or two, but they caused a severe earthquake in the process. A lot of Time Lords died. I don’t think Borusa was behind that initial project, but I think he was roped in to figure out what went wrong. I suspect Goth was in charge of the entire operation, but using a child’s mind to attract the demons was Borusa’s inspiration.”

“That piece of shit.”

“My sentiments.”

“He betrayed you,” the Master said. “I remember that.”

“He betrayed everyone, in the end, I think,” the Doctor mused.

“Why a child?”

“Not just any child, a young Time Lord. One who had the intelligence, the empathic skills, the sensitivity to time, but who hadn’t been trained, whose mind hadn’t been shaped to think in a certain way, cluttered up with theory and paradigms. An adult mind wouldn’t work.”

“Why me? Why not you, or the Rani, or one of the other kids? You mean they bred six decades’ worth of Time-Brats to get _me_?”

“It was your reaction to the time vortex,” the Doctor said. “You didn’t run, you didn’t hide, you weren’t afraid. You looked into it, and you _understood_. You saw all of creation, the wholeness, the unity. Nobody had to explain it to you; it was a moment of perfect clarity. And that was when the Time Lords knew. You possessed every quality they needed to attract those monsters. So they hooked you up to that thing, they amplified your brain waves—”

“ _Stop it!_ ”

The Doctor went quiet.

“I know what happened; I don’t need your—your _synopsis_!”

The Doctor waited, not saying a word. The Master’s face worked as he fought to keep rein on his emotions. After a few minutes, curiosity loosened his tongue again.

“And they drew those things into the void through me?”

“Yes. Through your mind.”

The Master’s control broke, and he twisted away, crying into the heels of his hands. The Doctor said nothing, did nothing. He only waited.

“How—how many?” The Master didn’t lift his head when he spoke.

“Almost a million. There were a million of them originally. A million minus two.” A million unspeakably evil beings, tearing through the mind and body of one small child.

“One—one got loose. When I was on Earth—it attacked—”

“It came through the space-time rift that runs through Cardiff,” the Doctor told him. “Abaddon, the son of the Great Beast. I saw it in your memories. You didn’t know what it was, but you felt it; you responded instinctively to its evil.”

“What stopped it? That can’t have been you.”

“It was Jack. Abaddon tried to feed off his life energy, but Jack’s life energy is powered by the time vortex now. In so many words, Abaddon gorged himself to death.”

Tiring, the Master inched himself backwards and leaned stiffly against the pillow, face puffy and swollen.

“Why didn’t they just kill me?” He seemed too weary to sustain the anger. “Why’d they let me live?”

“Vanity, pride, ego: take your pick. Goth and Borusa probably had thoughts of training you in their own image. And you seemed so normal for a long while. It wasn’t until you’d first regenerated that the damage started to show.”

“And the drums?”

“Just part of the block Borusa put on your memory. He leaned over you in the medical ward, and you heard his hearts, beating in that same rhythm. Every time your thoughts, conscious or unconscious, went near the ordeal, the drumming would kick in. And you began to build up psychic scar tissue, creating all sorts of defenses to protect yourself from the unthinkable. Every time you regenerated it got worse. There was something in there you couldn’t understand; it was upsetting you; and you responded like a wounded animal, lashing out at everything around you. Only now you had a Time Lord’s training and power, and the amount of damage you could do was staggering.”

“Why didn’t the Time Lords try to kill me then? Later?”

“Oh, that was their usual passive-aggressive behavior. They were frightened half to death of you, old friend, so they sent me after you, hoping I’d do their dirty work.”

“They should’ve known you’d be too soft for that,” the Master sneered.

“They probably figured you’d give me enough grief that I’d be forced to, eventually. They didn’t know me very well. That wasn’t the only time they tried to make a hit man out of me—they sent me back to wipe out the Daleks at their point of origin.”

“And you failed at that, too.”

“I’m proud to say I make a piss-poor assassin.” The Doctor paused, thinking of the many adversaries he’d destroyed. Most of those had crossed his path of their own volition, though; they weren’t beings the Time Lords had ordered him to kill. Darkening, he said, “Usually.”

The Master sank into the pillow, sliding down a bit.

“So, now what?” he asked. “You’ve exorcised my demons, literally. What next?”

“You come with me in the TARDIS.”

“As your sidekick?” the Master scoffed. “Really, Doctor. I think I’d rather die.”

The Doctor said, “You have a whole new set of regenerations; you have complete sanity—why not make a clean start?”

“All right, then. Drop me on any planet I choose, and I’ll start over again.”

“Fat chance,” the Doctor laughed.

“What, don’t you trust me?”

“Of course not.” The Doctor went serious again. “Name one thing you’ve done to earn my trust.”

The Master sulked.

“I seem to remember begging you to stop,” the Doctor said. “I offered to fight you anywhere you wanted, under one condition: leave Earth out of it. But you didn’t target Earth out of any particular animosity: you did it because you know I love that planet, and hurting it would hurt me. And to stack the deck a little more in your favor, you dragged Martha’s family into it. I gave you more second chances than I’ve ever given anyone, but you threw them all in my face. We’re the last two living Time Lords, and even that wouldn’t make you set aside your differences with me.” He raised one hand slightly and let it fall. “So, here we are. If you want my trust, you’ll earn it.”

“By joining you in all your do-gooder heroics?”

“I thought maybe we’d start with a holiday. I’ve had enough heroics for the moment.”

“Spare me. You can’t resist playing the great savior.” His eyes narrowed, and the Master said, “No matter how many planets in distress you save, Doctor, it won’t bring Gallifrey back.”

“That’s not why I do it.”

“Then why?”

“Because it’s there, it needs to be done, and I can do it,” the Doctor said. “I’m not out for my own glory.”

“But because it’s the right thing to do?” the Master sneered.

“Yes.” The Doctor regarded him. “I may not get wealth or power or even thanks out of it, but one thing I do get is love so strong I can use it as a defense against the blackest evil of all time.”

The Master didn’t respond. Maybe he was thinking back to that moment when the Doctor had shielded him from the demons, because after a pace, he sobered. “Those names.”

“Yes.”

“Your friends.”

“Yes.”

The Master stared at the wall. For all his scheming intelligence and Time Lord powers, he had nothing like that, no belief, nothing he could put faith in. Because of the Doctor’s ability to give and receive love, he’d always triumph over the Master in the end, and the Master knew it.

The other Time Lord slid down, reclining at length on the bed, his gaze now fixed on the ceiling. “So, that’s it,” he said. “I’m going to be on a short leash for a while, I can see that.”

“You know what the alternative is.”

“Eternity behind a mirror.”

“Don’t think I wouldn’t.”

The Master swallowed, closing his eyes, many emotions warring on his face. The Doctor stretched out beside him, propped on one elbow, watching him, silently willing him to rethink his life, his outlook on everything. He ruminated over one peculiarity: when the Master had become human, he’d turned into a benevolent man who’d spent his entire life trying to help others. The Doctor clung to that as proof that somewhere, deep in the Master, some potential for good existed.

“You really think I can change?”

“It’s not whether I think you can change; it’s whether _you_ think you can change.”

Turning his head to face the Doctor, the Master said, “Ever the optimist, aren’t you?”

“I mean it. Why not at least give it a try? Do something different, _be_ something different.”

“Like you, you mean.” The Master gave a quiet snort.

“Oh, not like me. One of me is more than enough.”

The Master couldn’t argue with that.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” the Doctor said. “If you keep going the way you are, they win.”

“Who wins?”

“The demons. Those Time Lords who used you like a lab rat. You go on killing and destroying, and you’ll never be free of them. They might be dead, but they’ve got you in chains, and they’re yanking those chains from beyond the grave.”

The Master just stared, as if this thought had never until now occurred to him.

“How badly do you want to be free of them?” the Doctor pressed. “You might think you’re acting of your own volition, but you’re just jerking along to the beat of Borusa’s drums. Is that what you want for the rest of your existence? Riches, power, domination over everything? What does it get you in the end? How happy does it make you? Does it fill up that empty spot at your core, the hungry ghost that can never be satisfied?”

“Stop,” the Master whispered. His eyes were closed, face creasing with pain; the Doctor had exposed his vulnerable underbelly. “Just—stop.”

Outside the room, complete darkness had fallen. Before long, dinner would be brought around. The next day, the two Time Lords would leave the hospital for good, and the Master would have to decide his fate.

“Doctor?” he asked faintly.

“Yeah?”

“What if I can’t control myself? What—what if I can’t—?”

“You _can_ ,” the Doctor insisted. “Look, nobody said you had to open a home for orphaned puppies, but how about getting through a day without killing something?”

Opening his eyes and turning to prop himself on an elbow, the Master said, “Even with all the baggage I’m toting around?”

“Cut it loose,” the Doctor urged. “You have everything ahead of you—health, strength, longevity—why not take advantage of it? Nobody has to know about the past. You don’t even look anything the way you used to. Which,” he smiled, “I must say is a definite improvement.”

“I’ll refrain from mentioning that multicolored abomination you used to wear.”

“Secret weapon,” the Doctor joked, “to blind my enemies.”

“Well, congratulations; it worked.”

They both laughed, more relaxed now, and the Doctor went on, “I’m serious. Keep calling yourself Professor Yana if you want to—it’s an ordinary enough name.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Will _you_ still call me Master?”

“Oh, now that depends.”

“Depends on what?” the Master asked, eyes alight.

“On how nicely you ask me.”

Somehow avoiding sarcasm, the Master said, “All right. Doctor, will you _please_ still call me Master?”

The Doctor wiggled closer and leaned over to breathe in the other Time Lord’s ear. “Yes, _Master_.”

The Master’s eyes closed, and he swallowed with an audible click. The Doctor gently traced the shape of the other Time Lord’s ear with the tip of his tongue.

“Doctor,” the Master murmured. “I like it when you say my name.” Then he gasped out loud. “And chew my earlobe.”

The Doctor’s tongue worked slowly along the Master’s jawline, licking its way across each tiny bit of stubble. He reached the Master’s chin and began to trace the outline of his mouth. The Master lay rigid, neither encouraging nor fighting this attention. Slowly, the Doctor leaned down, pressing his lips to the Master’s, an astonishingly chaste kiss, given the centuries of pent-up yearning behind it.

They parted, and the Master’s eyes opened, dilated. He reached up and laced his fingers around the back of the Doctor’s head, pulling him closer. The Doctor had been holding himself tense, but now he relaxed by cautious degrees against the other Time Lord’s body. The second kiss was longer, deeper, and they explored each other’s mouths. They settled in together, growing more comfortable as each let go of barriers and hostility. The Doctor slid his arms around the Master’s torso, drawing the other’s body closer, that ache to embrace one of his own kind finally satisfied.

He made no protests when the Master turned him onto his back, shifting his weight so that they lay hip to hip. The Doctor groaned in his throat. They kissed and kissed, wet, tongues fencing, teeth clicking together. The Master’s hands slid under his body, grasping his backside, and they rubbed against each other. Pleasure flared along every nerve, the Doctor shivering; his mind offering only token resistance. They should wait longer, build trust—but then his hands worked under the Master’s tunic, caressing that smooth skin, and the need for solace, for communion with his own species, overwhelmed every other consideration. The Master was shuddering, crying out, and the Doctor made no efforts to fight his own release, giving in to ecstasy that wracked through him, as blinding as it had been that day beside the deep pool on Gallifrey.

(v)

Afterwards, they undressed and drew back the covers of the bed, lying together, touching, examining each other’s bodies in minute detail. The Master didn’t stand as tall as the Doctor, but he had a solid, sturdy build, endearingly doughy at the middle. He laughed at the Doctor’s lanky frame and abundant body hair, running his fingers again and again through the dark pelt on his chest.

After a while, he muttered, “Wish I knew how to quit you.”

“Aw, why’d you wanna do that?” the Doctor smiled.

“It’s a line from a movie. An Earth movie.” At the Doctor’s blank expression, he said, “You mean you never saw it? The one about the two cowboys?” He sighed. “You’re hopeless.”

“Hopelessly devoted to you.”

“Wonderful, now I’ve got Olivia Bloody Newton-John running through my head.”

“It’s better than drums,” the Doctor offered.

The Master snorted, then a strange expression dawned in his eyes. “I forgot them.”

“What?”

“The drums. For a few minutes, I forgot them, like they were never there.”

The Doctor grinned widely. The Master began laughing, a genuine, unforced laugh of pure pleasure and happiness. The Doctor threw himself on the Master, seizing the other Time Lord and pulling him close.

“I’ve missed that laugh,” he said, leaning in for another delicious kiss.

The Master’s fingertips digging into the Doctor’s backside made it plain what _he’d_ missed. The Doctor loosened his grip and slid his hands around the front; the Master grunted as he got to work.

At last the Master could take no more, and he pushed away the Doctor’s hands. “Please,” he gasped.

From beneath his pillow, the Doctor withdrew the white jar. The Master’s eyes bugged out. “Where’d you get _that_?”

“Two floors up.”

“They keep that stuff lying about?”

The Doctor twisted off the top, letting the Master inhale. “It’s a mental hospital. One ailment they treat is sexual dysfunction.” He dabbed a tiny dot on his fingers, then smeared it on the Master’s nipples, rubbing it in, letting it take effect. “Best lubricant in the known universe. Best stimulant, too.”

“Like either one of us needs that,” the Master laughed hoarsely. The Doctor coated his hands with the stuff and got busy again; an instant later, the Master groaned, “Doctor—have mercy!” The Doctor raised an eyebrow, and the Master added in a small voice, “Please.”

The Doctor set aside the jar. He turned around and knelt, offering himself.

The Master hesitated, but only for an instant.

(vi)

They stood together in the shower, water pouring over them. The Master leaned against the Doctor, head on his shoulder. The Doctor had his arms around the Master’s ribs, not wanting ever to let go. They didn’t kiss or caress or speak: the moment was so perfect that it transcended anything either of them could have said.

They emerged from the steamy bathroom to discover dinner had been set out for them, twice as much food as usual. There was a basket of fruit, exotic to the eye and sensual to the touch; the Doctor suspected Vamana’s hand. He and the Master fairly threw themselves onto the feast, eating with a rapacious appetite. The fare was still vegan: all fruits and vegetables and grains, but the Master didn’t complain. He especially enjoyed the fruit, closing his eyes and shuddering slightly as he bit into each piece. The Doctor loved watching his face, loved watching him react to each new experience.

Afterward, they retreated to the bed with cups of warm tea, lying propped up against the pillows.

“I’d give my next regeneration for a cognac right now,” the Master murmured.

The Doctor had been tracing idle patterns on the Master’s shoulder. “Maybe we can make our first stop somewhere to eat,” he said. “Steak and a good wine, maybe crème brûlée for dessert.”

“So, we’re going back to Earth?”

“No, not Earth,” the Doctor said. “Not for a while, anyway. We can find someplace that serves Earth-type food, though.”

“You still don’t trust me.”

“As lovely as this has all been, it’s the first step of a long journey. Don’t rush things. You need to cool off; we can go back to Earth once the Saxon brouhaha’s died down.”

“What about Lucy?”

“What about her?”

“What’ll happen to her?”

“Do you really care?” the Doctor asked.

The Master grumped, “I was fond of her in my own way, difficult as that may be for you to believe.”

“What happened; did things go sour when she couldn’t have a baby?”

The Master’s jaw dropped, and he stared at the Doctor, stunned.

“I knew what was going on,” the Doctor said. “Especially the way you two would vanish for three or four days every twenty-eight days. Then she started looking puffy and bloated. You were giving her drugs to increase her fertility.”

The Master stared down at his tea.

“It wasn’t going to work,” the Doctor chided. “We have more chromosomes than humans. It would’ve been impossible.” He paused. “Unless you were trying to alter her genetics.”

“I would’ve found a solution eventually.”

“She never would’ve carried to term.”

Darkly, the Master said, “I had to at least try.” He glanced at the Doctor. “Wouldn’t you want to see our race continue in one form or another? Even diluted with lesser stock?”

The Doctor didn’t answer. He’d told Rose it was impossible for her to conceive his child, but he’d never stopped hoping that by some miracle they might defy biology. At the end, when he’d said goodbye to her, and she’d mentioned the baby, he’d thought for one wild instant… but then she’d said it was her mother, not her, and that door had closed forever. He smiled at the odd parallel: the Master had been attempting exactly the same thing, only more ruthlessly, with Lucy.

“What happened, did she get sick? Ask you to stop giving her the drugs? And you lost your temper and hit her?” The Doctor kept his tone gentle, not accusing.

After a moment, the Master nodded, chagrined.

“All things considered, I think you should leave Lucy alone for now. You’ve done enough damage; she’ll probably spend the rest of her life recovering from it.”

The Master swirled the tea in his cup, then drank. He leaned against the Doctor, eyes closed, not arguing. Much of his usual anger seemed to have drained out of him. He’d probably always lean toward sarcasm—even as a child, he’d had a cutting sense of humor, and the Doctor wouldn’t want to see that change. But he seemed more relaxed now, less hostile.

“So, where to?” he asked. “Where do we go after this?”

“Someplace quiet,” the Doctor said, kissing the side of the Master’s head. The other Time Lord appeared troubled, and the Doctor said, “If you really care about Lucy, the best thing you can do for her right now is stay away from her. Trying to explain or apologize will only make it worse. I don’t think her mind is in a place where she could process an apology. If she’s going to forgive you—truly forgive you—she needs to be in her right mind when she does.” The Doctor bore Lucy no particular ill-will, but he didn’t feel especially sorry for her. He had little pity for a woman who’d danced as her planet was decimated.

The Master nodded and set aside his teacup. The Doctor did the same, and they turned to each other, jolting at the pleasure of physical contact. They kissed, the Doctor tasting something like desperation in the Master’s mouth. Pleasure rose up over them in great, smoldering waves, and they made love in the red heat, oblivious to everything else.

(vii)

“He made a pass at me.”

Half-asleep, the Doctor murmured, “What? Who made a pass at you?”

“Who do you think?”

“Borusa?”

“The lecherous old fuck. I was done my academy training, and he visited my lab with some of the High Council members. After the inspection, he suggested…” The Master trailed off, staring into a darkened corner of the room. “I’d forgotten about that. It just came back now.”

“Some old memories are still stirring.” The Doctor caressed his chest. “Don’t let it bother you—he’s dead and gone, lived out the end of his existence as a statue in the Dark Tower. I assume you had the sense to turn him down?”

“With a few choice words.”

“Good for you.” The Doctor kissed his shoulder.

“Like I ever would’ve been interested in someone who always looked like a late middle-aged banker. You’d think he’d have wanted to regenerate into something other than gray and paunchy.”

The Doctor gave him a teasing little nudge. “You seemed to find old and decrepit oddly attractive on me.”

The Master’s breath whistled out. “Don’t joke about that.”

“Oh, come on,” the Doctor said. “It’s not like there was any lasting damage.”

The Master turned away his head, swallowing. The Doctor noted his reaction with interest and a measure of optimism, pleased to see the Master showing some acknowledgement of his own wrongdoings.

As if to distract himself, the Master asked, “What’d you look like last time?”

“What, my last body?”

“Yes.” The Master ran a hand up the Doctor’s thigh. “I never got to see that one.”

“About the same height. Bigger frame. Big nose, big ears, big chin. Not much hair. Northern English accent for some reason I could never figure out; sounded like I’d just crawled out of a pub in Manchester.”

“Wot, like this?”

The Doctor laughed. “Exactly like that.”

“Were your eyes brown, then?”

“No, blue. This is the only body I’ve ever had brown…” The Doctor grinned. “You’ve been keeping track of my eye color? You romantic little so-and-so.”

“Stuff it,” the Master said, good-natured.

“Well, _you’ve_ never been blond before,” the Doctor teased.

“Enjoy it while it lasts.” The Master ran a disgruntled hand across the top of his head. “Not bad enough that it’s falling out in clumps, now it’s going white as well.”

“There’s a pair of us, then.” The Doctor flipped up his fringe to show the Master his receding hairline. “Maybe I could transplant some of this.” He patted his chest rug, and the Master broke into loud, raucous laughter, pulling the Doctor against him in a tight, aggressive embrace. His fingers roamed downward.

“Who needs hair?” he said, his voice growing dangerous, “when I could fuck this gorgeous ass clear across the universe and back again?”

“Well, goodness, I hope I’m not stopping you,” the Doctor chuckled. They kissed and nuzzled and playfully nipped at each other.

“You had a leather coat,” the Master said abruptly.

“The black thing, yeah,” the Doctor said, settling back on the pillow. “I see someone had a butcher’s at the TARDIS wardrobe.”

“Why don’t you wear it any more?” the Master pressed.

“It’s two sizes too big, that’s why.” The Doctor raised a questioning eyebrow. “D’you want it? If it’s big on me, it’d swim on you.”

The Master swallowed hard. “I’d rather see it on you…” He put a meaningful emphasis on, “…sometimes.”

Comprehension dawned on the Doctor. “Ohh! _Sometimes_.” He grinned. “As in the bedroom sense of ‘sometimes?’”

“Hmm.” The Master nuzzled the Doctor’s shoulder, eyes closed, expression rapt, as if envisioning this. “And nothing else, except maybe my necktie as a blindfold.”

The Doctor felt himself tightening up. “Works for me.” His voice had grown high-pitched, a bit breathless. The Master kissed him, a deep, wet, grinding kiss, then turned the Doctor onto his belly and grabbed for the lubricant.

After a searing hour, they lay curled together again, silent, contemplating the perfection of the moment.

“I could learn to like this,” the Master said at length.

“I already have,” the Doctor admitted.

“Aah, two Time Lords, growing old together like a pair of flaming queens. Is that how the Earthlings would describe us?”

The Doctor laughed. “As Jack would say, humans and their funny little categories.” He turned, draping an arm around the Master. “No Scissor Sisters in the TARDIS.”

“So long as you promise never to sing in the shower.”

“You’ll have to, then.” The Doctor kissed him. “Since your voice is better than mine.”

“Deal.”

More serious now, the Doctor cautioned, “I’ll grow old with you, but you’re going to outlive me by a few millennia, probably.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“This is my tenth body,” the Doctor reminded him. “Only three more after this one.”

The Master’s breath shifted. “That can’t be…” The Doctor watched him do some mental arithmetic. “Tenth? Are you sure?”

The Doctor grinned, “I haven’t miscounted, trust me.”

The Master flopped back against his pillow, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. “This is only my second in this regeneration cycle. I have eleven more…” He looked close to tears. “No.”

“Sorry,” the Doctor murmured. “I shouldn’t have brought it up just now.”

Hesitantly, the Master offered, “Doctor, there _are_ ways—”

“No!” the Doctor almost shouted. “No, don’t even think about it. When I’m done, I’m done. Any Time Lord who tried to extend his life beyond twelve regenerations went irretrievably mad—including you.”

“But I’ll—” A dreadful expression dawned over the Master’s features as he realized that ultimately he would end up in the same situation as the Doctor: the last surviving member of a dead species.

“Be the last one,” the Doctor finished. Squeezing the Master’s shoulders, he said, “With that in mind, you’d best work at keeping me alive as long as possible, hmm?”

“I don’t—”

“I know you don’t want to be alone. But you’re not alone now.” The Doctor kissed him. “Let’s focus on what we _do_ have, instead of dwelling on what we someday might not.” Intertwining his fingers through the Master’s he said, “I want you with me. No matter what. Until the end of my days, I don’t want to be without you.” He kissed the Master’s forehead. “You’re the most important thing to me right now.”

The Master reacted with disbelief. “How could you?”

“How could I what?”

Pulling away and turning over onto his back, the Master said, “How could you want me, after everything I did to you?” He barked a shaky, ironic laugh. “I caused you to regenerate twice. I can see that’s coming back to bite me in the ass, isn’t it?”

“You weren’t in your right mind. I’m not saying what you did was completely beyond your volition, but you were acting under influences you knew nothing about.”

“I was a monster.” The Master’s expression suggested he was seeing his own past for the first time from a different perspective, through the other end of the telescope, all his evil laid bare and exposed to the light of day.

“Yes, you were.” The Doctor kept his tone neutral.

The tears started in a hot sluice. “Dammit,” the Master gasped. He accused the Doctor, “You did this to me on purpose! You knew this would happen! You knew I’d feel—” He broke off, barking with sobs. “So many interesting new experiences,” he snarked through his tears. “I suppose this must be grief.”

“No, what you felt before was grief. This is regret.” The Doctor kept his tone even. “I didn’t do this to hurt you. I want to heal you, and it’s a process. You can’t walk out of here expecting everything will be wonderful, as if the past never existed.” He took one of the Master’s hands in both of his own, and he urged, “Let yourself feel all this, and let it go. Don’t try to brush it aside or hide it. Look what you were hiding before—it almost destroyed you.”

The Master said nothing, kept crying. It wasn’t like before, those drawn-out, heartrending sobs. This was more of a dull, harsh monotone.

The Doctor waited, let him cry it out, then took the Master’s chin in his hand, turning the tear-streaked face to his own.

“Tell me you’re sorry.”

The Master struggled, his pride still trying to assert itself, but then he broke down. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. He put his head to the Doctor’s shoulder, sobbing bitterly. “I’m so sorry!”

The Doctor embraced him, rocking him. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “I forgive you.”

“Just like that?”

“You say you’re sorry—I forgive you—that’s how it works.”

The Master drew away slightly, staring at him. “It’s that easy?”

“I never said it was easy.”

The Master processed all this. “How could you possibly forgive me?”

“Because I love you.” How easily the words slipped out. The Doctor wondered why they’d always seemed so difficult before.

He expected cynicism, waiting for the Master to scoff at what he must perceive as an admission of weakness. Instead, he gave the Doctor a queer, blank expression, as if this revelation was utterly beyond his comprehension.

“Oh, come on,” the Doctor smiled, teasing, brushing back the Master’s hair. “You know I’ve always loved you. That’s hardly a secret.”

The Master kept staring. Then the tears started again, and he pressed his face into the Doctor’s shoulder, weeping. His mouth worked; the Doctor could feel him trying to form the words and not quite succeeding.

_Go on, say it!_ the Doctor silently exhorted him. _Say it! Throw off those chains forever!_ But something—pride, lingering resentment—stilled the Master’s tongue. After a few minutes he gave up the effort, crying until he fell asleep. Still, the Doctor thought, as he cradled the other Time Lord in his arms, it represented a breakthrough. He kissed the Master’s head. They had plenty of time, long days ahead of them to repair their burned bridges—they couldn’t all be fixed in one night. Satisfied, the Doctor shut his eyes and sank into blissful, untroubled slumber.

(viii)

Later he blinked awake, aware of something different: he was alone in the bed. The Doctor sat. He could feel dawn approaching, perhaps an hour away. His eyes scanned the dim room, and he spotted a shape huddled in one of the chairs, near the window, facing out into the fathomless night.

The Doctor stood, padding on silent feet across the room. The Master had wrapped himself in a blanket from the other bed to keep warm. He wasn’t crying, not any more. In the faint light, his face appeared carved from stone. The Doctor put a hand on his shoulder.

“I can’t stop thinking about her.”

The Doctor gave a gentle squeeze, surprised at the Master’s reactions; it seemed he might have harbored some deeper-than-expected feelings for his trophy wife.

“She loved me. So much.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor said.

“I destroyed her. Without thinking.”

The Doctor said nothing, letting the Master experience this guilt, this shame.

“She was so loyal to me. Always.”

Of course she would have been. The Doctor was glad the Master couldn’t see his lip curling. He knew Lucy’s type too well: spoiled, entitled, privileged by her skin color, her education, her beauty, her parents’ wealth and position. How easily the Master must have convinced her to be his mate, inviting her to be queen of the Earth. She had giggled over the murders of millions, people she’d no doubt considered beneath her. Naturally, she would be loyal to the marvelous being who’d elevated her to a position she must have always regarded as hers by right.

“Seventeen years,” the Master said, his voice like gravel. “She served me for seventeen years. And I killed her without a second thought.”

_Seventeen years?_ Then the Doctor understood: the Master wasn’t talking about Lucy. He was talking about Chantho.

“I woke up thinking about her. It was like I heard her voice in my mind. I expected to see her in the room when I woke up, that’s how clear her voice was.”

“You were dreaming.”

“It felt so real.” The Master reached up and took the Doctor’s hand, kissed it, held it to his face. “Doctor—can we go back and—?”

“No.” The Doctor’s voice was gentle, firm. “No, you already created one paradox; if you try to go back and undo any of that, it’ll cause a second paradox, and believe me when I say you don’t want a pack of Reapers on your hands.”

“But Chantho—”

“She’s gone,” the Doctor said. “I’m sorry. She was the last of her kind on a dying planet in a dying universe. You only hastened the inevitable. I know you’re sorry now, but you can’t go back and undo everything you’ve done.”

The Master’s head fell forward.

“It’s always going to be like this,” he said, a statement, not a question. “Everywhere I go, no matter what I do, there’ll be reminders of everyone I killed, everything I destroyed. There’ll be no escaping from it.”

“Don’t try to hide from it,” the Doctor said. “Don’t wallow in your own guilt—that’ll lead to self-pity in a heartbeat—but acknowledge what you’ve done. In time, you’ll make peace with yourself.”

“Have you?”

“What?”

“Made peace with yourself.”

“On some things,” the Doctor allowed. “Not others.” He massaged the Master’s tight shoulders with his hands. “I’m here. I’ll be right there with you. I’m not going to mollycoddle you about your past, but if you need someone to talk to about it, you know I’ll listen. You won’t have to go through it alone. It won’t be easy, but I think you’ll come through stronger in the end.” He wrapped his arms around the Master and leaned down, pressing the side of his face to the other Time Lord’s cheek. “Do it for her,” he encouraged. “If nothing else, you can honor her memory by becoming once again the man she knew and loved. Think how happy she’d be.”

The Master nodded after a moment, exhaling a loud rush of breath.

“Come on,” the Doctor said, gently urging the Master to his feet. “You can’t solve everything in one night.”

The Master allowed himself to be steered across the floor and back into bed. The Doctor curled up beside him, waiting until he fell asleep, then flopped back onto his own pillow. For a moment, he felt like the biggest hypocrite in the universe. For all his good intentions, his own past was far from unblemished; there had been times when he’d acted out of anger, spite, selfishness, and more than once, a lust for retribution. He hardly was one to lecture the Master on finding another path in life, turning away from violence, embracing peace and forgiveness.

But who else was there? There wasn’t one other being in existence who not only knew the full extent of the Master’s past but who understood the forces that had shaped him. The Doctor realized that, ironically, without his own transgressions, he’d have no empathy for the other Time Lord. _If anyone’s going to help him_ , the Doctor thought, _it has to be me_.

Maybe in helping the Master find peace, he’d be able also to make amends for his own faults. The Doctor resolved to learn some humility, to stop walling himself up in an emotional fortress. He could hardly help the Master if he couldn’t address his own issues. _Physician, heal thyself_. He closed his eyes, settling into slumber, determined to turn over a fresh leaf. How appropriate, for him and the Master to make this difficult journey together.

(ix)

The sun had risen, bright outside the tinted windows, by the time the Doctor awoke again. He lay feeling groggy for a few moments, fighting the urge to return to sleep. They were leaving today, he remembered, sitting up.

The remains of the previous night’s feast still lay on the table. He wondered why the usually punctilious staff had neglected to bring breakfast; perhaps Vamana had cautioned that the two Time Lords weren’t to be disturbed. He smiled at her thoughtfulness, but he was hungry. He hopped up, grabbing for his tunic and trousers, then realized he couldn’t hear any noise from the bathroom. Surprised, he checked: empty. The bedsheets were growing cool. Where had the Master gone? In search of breakfast, most likely.

He trudged out into the hallway and down to the attendant’s station.

“Can I help you?” chirped a nurse with dark green skin and lavender eyes.

“Yes, I’m looking for Professor Yana, a patient on this ward—Vamana had given orders that he wasn’t to leave the floor, but he might’ve come looking for breakfast.”

She checked something on a monitor. “Yes, Professor Yana was out here about twenty minutes ago,” she reported. “He said he was hungry and that his head hurt, so we gave him breakfast and salicylic acid.”

The Doctor could only stare at her, uncomprehending. “What?” he wheezed.

“We gave him food and salicylic acid tablets,” she said patiently. “Aspirin. For his headache.”

“But that’s—” Both hearts began pounding in painful tandem. “ _Where is he?_ ” the Doctor screamed, racing around the station, head whipping from side to side. “Where is he; where’d he go?”

“I don’t—the patients’ lounge, probably; it’s right down here.” The attendant shot out from around the desk, moving with incredible speed, given her small, stout build. “Why; what’s the matter?”

“We can’t have aspirin; it’s poisonous to Time Lords—deadly poisonous! How many tablets did you give him?”

“Six,” the attendant said, her voice panicky; she hit a small button on her tunic, speaking into a communications device. “Code Gamma-Nu, level 327; I repeat, Code Gamma-Nu, level 327; request immediate assistance!”

“Why’d you give him asprin?” the Doctor shouted.

“It wasn’t in his chart that he couldn’t have it!” she said, stopping before a closed door. She pressed the entry button: nothing happened. The Doctor banged on the unyielding plastic with his fists.

“Open up!” he screamed. “Koschei, don’t do this!” He turned to the nurse, hysterically demanding, “Why isn’t it opening?”

“Something’s jamming it!”

The Doctor instinctively felt for his sonic screwdriver, then he remembered: he’d given it to Vamana. “No!”

“I’ll open it remotely!” the attendant gasped, speeding back down the hall. The Doctor pressed his hands flat on the door, pushing first in one direction, then the other.

The sheet of hard plastic began to move, slowly, as if some force were blocking it from within. The Doctor threw every ounce of his strength into pushing, then he realized a piece of furniture had been jammed against the door.

He budged the plastic far enough to get his fingers around the edge, able to exert more pressure, then he got both hands in there and gave a massive shove. The door slid open about a quarter of the way, enough for the Doctor to shimmy his narrow body through and clamber over the sofa that had been wedged into the doorframe.

His nose told him, even before his eyes, that he’d come too late. A ripe, fetid stench filled the small room, making the Doctor gag, his eyes water: the stink of blood and excrement and bodily fluids leaking out through seemingly every pore and orifice of the Master’s body.

The Time Lord lay sprawled extravagantly in the center of the room. On a low table nearby lay a tray of uneaten food, a tumbler of water, and three pale aspirin tablets. He’d swallowed only half of what the nurse had allotted, but that was more than sufficient.

The Doctor dropped to his knees, sobbing, heedless of the blood and filth. The Master’s body was like a grotesque water balloon, making a wet, sloshing noise when the Doctor lifted the torso. He patted the Master’s cheeks, peeled open his eyelids, but the whites were blood-red from hemorrhage. He could find only the most thready pulse.

“No!” He smacked the Master’s face. “No, you can’t do this!” He gasped, a fresh wave of horror sweeping over him when he realized the Master’s body wasn’t changing. He was willing himself not to regenerate.

“ _NO!_ ” he screamed, shaking the Master in a futile effort to revive him. “Regenerate! Regenerate, damn you!” A last, wheezy, wet breath escaped the Master, and his hearts went still. “Regenerate!” But it was too late: the Master couldn’t hear him, his body lifeless as clay. Almost blinded by tears now, the Doctor put his fingers to the Master’s temples in a desperate effort to make some kind of contact with the other Time Lord’s mind. But he found only static, even that fading quickly to nothing.

“ _Noooooo!_ ” He pulled the Master’s body against his, despair slamming into him, the annihilating pain of solitude, the knowledge that he was, again, last of his kind. He howled in futility, rocking back and forth, screaming his anguish to the unfeeling walls.

He raised his head, his attention transfixed for a moment by the three tablets on the tray, the escape and peace they represented. The Doctor let the Master’s body fall with a wet thud to the floor and crawled on his hands and knees to the table, tracking gore everywhere. He grabbed the pills in one hand, the water in the other.

Before he could put the tablets in his mouth, a shadow fell over him. A great hand descended, striking him on the head. He fell forward, immediately unconscious, the aspirin and water tumbling to the floor.

(x)

He came to awareness of agony, pain ripping along every fiber, brain and spine firing out-of-control neural impulses. He began screaming, thrashing; there were voices, then a cool, wet swab on his arm, the brief sting of a needle. Merciful blackness followed.

When consciousness came again, the pain was gone. He wiggled fingers and toes experimentally, holding his breath, before making an effort to peel open his eyes. The lids, matted with gunk, at first didn’t want to budge. He felt something warm and wet on his face, cleaning away the gummy residue.

“Is that better?”

Vamana’s blue face hovered above his, concerned. The Doctor groaned a response. He was lying in some odd foam contraption, his neck supported in a brace, legs propped at the knee.

“We had to keep your spine flat,” she explained, circling the bed, sitting in a large chair. The Doctor realized he must be in Vamana’s private quarters: the bed he lay in was enormous. “Can you sit?”

The Doctor flexed his muscles and sat, relieved to find everything working. He pushed away from the foam contraption, sitting propped against a pillow big enough to use as a mattress. He’d been washed, dressed in a crisp blue hospital uniform.

“I apologize for striking you,” she said.

“Don’t. You stopped me from doing something incredibly stupid.”

Her face was inscrutable, but he sensed her compassion easily enough.

“Where—” the Doctor swallowed— “where is he?”

“In the chambers of the dead. We’ve been waiting for your funerary instructions.”

“A pyre,” the Doctor said, a dull pain knocking at his insides. “Time Lords are always burned on a pyre. At night.”

She nodded. “We can arrange it for tonight, if you wish.”

“What time is it?” The Doctor’s usually reliable internal clock had been thrown off. “Afternoon?”

“Two hours after noon,” she confirmed.

He stared around the room, the Spartan decor: Vamana’s true life was lived elsewhere. Other than the size of the furniture, this could have been anyone’s quarters.

“Why?” the Doctor asked, despair growing inside him. “Why’d he do it?”

“For some patients, the cure is worse than their illness, the criminally insane most of all. In the rare events where they can be fully healed, they often take their lives out of remorse. Your friend had many, many centuries of evil to be accountable for, and when you ended his mania, his conscience had a chance to assert itself.”

“Why didn’t you warn me before I started?”

“Would that have stopped you?”

“No,” the Doctor admitted. “No, it wouldn’t.” A sense of shame washed over him, followed by a flood of self-recrimination. “I pushed him too hard. I should’ve given it more time.” He shouldn’t have slept with the Master so soon; he certainly shouldn’t have pressed for an apology. He should have been more reserved, more circumspect…

Vamana interrupted his self-flagellation. “No, his cure could never have been a gradual process. Either he knew about his ordeal or he didn’t; there was no middle ground. Don’t berate yourself—you acted out of selflessness and compassion, and he couldn’t face the truth of his own evil.”

“I could have helped him,” the Doctor insisted. “I’d have been right there with him—why didn’t he let me _help_?”

“He needed to take that step himself,” Vamana reminded him. “You’d done all you could, gave him unconditional love and support. The rest was up to him, and he lacked the courage for it.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t warn you about aspirin.” Now that the litany of guilt had started, it rolled on like a runaway freight train. “I never thought—” He broke off, scrubbing his forehead with his hand.

“How could you anticipate he’d end his own life? For most of his existence, he was driven by the urge for self-preservation. And if he hadn’t taken his life here, he would have found the means to do so later.”

The Doctor nodded, understanding the truth of her words, but unable to prevent feeling terribly responsible. He had vowed to care for the Master, and he’d failed. How could he have neglected such a simple detail? He’d completely forgotten to tell the staff that Time Lords couldn’t tolerate salicylic acid. Used as a painkiller, anti-inflammatory, and blood thinner by many other species, it was toxic to Time Lord physiology. It caused the collapse of protein structures, leading to the breakdown of cell walls and massive internal hemorrhage. It acted with frightful speed, and a very low dose was lethal—a single aspirin tablet would be fatal to a fully grown adult. The Master, in swallowing three of them, had taken no chances.

“Thank you, Vamana,” the Doctor said. “I appreciate everything you’ve done.”

She stood. “I only wish I could have done more.” She helped him to his feet. “Never regret loving him.”

The Doctor nodded, unable to speak, and he followed her from the room.

(xi)

The desert night was freezing, far colder than the Doctor had expected. A pair of solemn attendants led him to the remote canyon where the pyre had been constructed. One of them handed him a torch, and they withdrew, silent and respectful.

At his instructions, the Master’s body had been placed atop the wood pile so that his head was oriented toward the gaping spot in the cosmos where Gallifrey had once been. He’d been cleaned, shrouded in linen. The Doctor felt no need to view once again the degraded corpse of his enemy and lover.

Some corner of his mind marveled at the quantity of wood, which must have been brought in from off-world. He wondered dully if the hospital kept a supply on hand for sad occasions such as this. On Gallifrey, of course, wood had been plentiful. Time Lords always burned the bodies of their dead, burned them to ash, lest the secrets of their engineered biology be stolen.

A thin, bitter wind moaned through the canyon, finding its way beneath the Doctor’s layers of clothes. Unable to delay the moment any longer, he circled the pyre in an anti-clockwise direction, touching the torch to five points. Driven by the wind, the flames leaped eagerly through the dry kindling. With the blaze underway, the Doctor tossed the torch into the pyre and withdrew to a safe distance, climbing up onto a boulder, where he sat, watching.

He felt so numb, so raw, stunned beyond even tears. One thought kept circling through his mind: _what a waste_. What a tragic waste. The Master had had every opportunity for a second chance, a boon so few beings ever enjoyed. He could have had peace, freedom, love, forgiveness. He could have put away the past and made a clean start. Instead, he’d surrendered to despair, given up. The Doctor knew intellectually that Vamana was right: the Master was a coward. He hadn’t been willing to put himself through the guilt and grief and suffering necessary to cleanse his soul. But the Doctor still couldn’t stop lamenting his own short-sightedness, his failure to read the signals, to keep more vigilant watch on his friend. A voice accused him, _He went and committed suicide while you were sleeping!_

The bonfire roared up, and the Master’s body dropped into the center of the pyre, consumed by the searing heat.

_Now what?_ the Doctor wondered. For the past year, he’d been planning this, plotting how he would cure the Master’s illness; the previous night, his mind had been awhirl with visions of the future. In those daydreams, the Master had been with him, by his side, traveling with him through time and space, sharing his life. Now he felt cut adrift, not sure what to do. He seemed to hear in his mind lyrics to a plaintive song: _the plans I made still have you in them…_ He couldn’t, at the moment, remember the rest.

Even as he wondered, he knew the answer: back to the TARDIS, back to his nomadic life of perpetual wandering, perpetual loneliness, passing his days with a series of transitory friends who could touch his life but never fill it.

He waited until the pyre collapsed completely in on itself, burning down to glowing embers. As a precaution, he ventured closer to the site, making sure nothing of the Master remained, before he turned and left the canyon for good. Outside, he found the two attendants, waiting patiently to escort him back to the hospital.

(xii)

“These are for you.”

The Doctor stared down at the shrouded bundle Vamana had just placed in his arms.

“What is it?” he asked.

“His effects.”

Then he understood, nodding wearily: the Master’s clothes. The Doctor wondered what he should do with them. Throw them out somewhere? A grand, operatic gesture, perhaps, pitching the Master’s things into a black hole? Or stash them in the TARDIS wardrobe, for one of his future incarnations to pillage?

He’d make that decision later. For now, he shook hands with Vamana one last time.

“Thank you,” he said.

She inclined her head. “Would you like an escort to your ship?”

“No,” he said. “No, I know just where I left it.”

The glass-like ring rumbled around the outer wall of the hospital, and the door opened.

“Farewell, Time Lord,” Vamana called as he departed.

A pale glow suffused the rocky landscape. In a matter of minutes, the sun would creep up over the horizon. In the sky above the hospital, the moon cast its cold, baleful light upon the blighted planet.

The TARDIS stood just where the Doctor had left it: small, blue, steadfast, the one constant in his life. The interior glowed, welcoming him back inside, like the touch of a loved hand.

**To be continued…**


	6. Sympathy for the Devil--Part Six

Part VI

_Waiting on a Friend_

The chirping cell phone interrupted Jack’s brooding reverie. He checked the caller ID screen and chuckled as he thumbed the “send” button.

“Hey, stranger.”

“Jack!” Toshiko’s voice nearly split his eardrum. “Oh, my God, you’re alive!”

“Aren’t I usually?”

“What’s going on? Where’d you go? We had an emergency call about a yeti, and we’ve been trekking around Bhutan for a week. When we finally realized it was all a sham, we were stranded by a blizzard—now we’re in Nepal, and—”

“Tosh,” Jack laughed, “when can you get home?”

“We’re leaving from Kathmandu, tomorrow,” she said. “We’re flying to Paris first thing in the morning. We should be back in Cardiff sometime Wednesday or Thursday. Air travel into and out of the UK is impossible at the moment, so we’re hoping to drive.”

“No rush,” Jack said. “How come you’re the one calling me?”

“I drew the short straw.”

He laughed again, louder this time. “I love you guys.”

“Jack, what’s going on? We finally got back to civilization to find the US president has been assassinated and the Prime Minister is accused of killing him! And nobody knows where he is—”

“It’s all right; it’s all over. Saxon’s… in custody.”

“I thought he’d vanished?”

“That’s the official story.”

“Oh! Jack—is there some strange phenomena at work here? Gwen and Ianto have been having very peculiar nightmares.”

“I’ll explain it all when you get back.” Jack’s gaze settled on the front page of the _Times_ , the headlines still screaming about the Saxon scandal and the “international crisis” it had ignited. _If they only knew half the truth_ , Jack thought.

“All right,” Tosh said, reluctant to let it drop.

“Trust me, it’s a long story, best told over a vat of liquor.”

He heard voices in the background, and Tosh said, “Everyone says hello.”

“Tell them I said hi.” Jack’s right ear twitched, and he said, “Tosh, I need to run. Call me again when you reach Paris.”

“All right. But Jack—”

He disconnected, bolting for the exit, as the sonic whine intensified, followed by the familiar indescribable groaning rumble.

(ii)

The blue box sat in the center of the Roald Dahl Plass. People walked back and forth, most passing it without giving it a second glance.

Jack ran at full tilt across the paving stones. This time, he didn’t need to fling himself onto the ship. The door opened, and a tall, brown-clad figure stepped out.

Jack’s first thought was that the Doctor had aged—he looked far older than he ever had on the _Valiant_ : stooped, haggard, exhausted beyond measure. Beneath the brown coat, his clothes were askew, jacket mis-buttoned, as if he’d tried to dress himself in pitch darkness. He spotted Jack and lurched toward him, one leg seemingly two inches longer than the other.

Heart in his throat, Jack bolted, catching the alien in his arms and pulling him into an embrace. Without the Doctor saying a word, Jack knew what had happened. In his arms, the Time Lord felt lifeless, his beautiful, slender body like a bird’s corpse: a collection of delicate bones held together by desiccated skin and feathers.

“What?” Jack croaked. “Did you—did you—?” He couldn’t bring himself to speak the words.

“He ended it himself.” His hoarse, rough voice distressed Jack almost more than his appearance. Beneath lank hair, the Doctor’s face was ravaged, eyes sunken into deep, black shadows.

Jack exhaled a whistling breath. “Oh, God. Doctor, I’m so sorry.”

The Doctor nodded.

“Come on.” The alien protested, but Jack wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Get inside. You look like hell.”

He steered the Doctor into the Hub and made him sit with his feet up. Jack sped about, fixing tea, liberally dosing it with whiskey and lemon.

“Down the hatch,” he ordered, thrusting the mug into the Doctor’s hands. “All of it.”

The Doctor drank obediently, too numb to argue. _His eyes_ , Jack thought. _Oh, God, his eyes_.

“Where’d you go?” asked Jack, sitting opposite the Doctor. “It’s been almost a week.”

“A hospital.” The Doctor clutched the mug tightly enough to throw into prominent relief all the veins and tendons of his long hands.

Jack said, “You took him to a hospital? To try to cure him?”

The Doctor nodded.

“And it worked?”

“Yes.” He dropped his head into his hands and began to sob in choking, horrible gasps, his empty mug tumbling to the floor.

Jack scooted over and put his arms around the thin shoulders. “Let me hug you, dammit!” he said, rocking the distraught Time Lord back and forth. “Tell me what happened. Get it off your chest.”

“I read his mind,” the Doctor said when he could speak. “Found out what caused the drums. It was—an—an experiment the Time Lords subjected him to when he was eight.”

“Oh, Christ!” Jack suspected there was much more to it than that, but he didn’t press for gory details. “And this made him crazy?”

“He never understood—I had to walk him through it—those memories—he re-lived the whole thing.” The Doctor kept sobbing. “What they did—what they did to him—”

“Shh, it’s okay. How’d he react? Was he upset, or did he just get even more angry at you?” Jack rubbed the Doctor’s back as he spoke.

“He was angry at first, but he came to terms with it when I made him talk.” The Doctor reached a hand around to wipe his face. “He saw his past in a completely new light—owned some responsibility for the things he’d done.”

“Huge step,” Jack nodded.

“He apologized to me.”

“Incredible,” Jack said. “I never would’ve believed it.”

“He showed a lot of remorse over how he treated Lucy. But it was remembering Chantho that drove him over the edge.” The Doctor drew away, in better control of himself now. “Could I bother you for more tea?”

“Done.” Jack poured another mug from the ceramic teapot, added whiskey and lemon, and brought it to the Doctor, who by now had stopped crying and was gazing around the Hub with curious eyes.

“Chantho was the Malmooth who’d worked with him when he was human, right?” Jack barely remembered her.

The Doctor nodded. “I think it ate at him because he couldn’t apologize to her. He apologized to me, and since Lucy’s still alive, he could’ve apologized to her, too, eventually. But Chantho’s dead and gone, and he had no way to ask her forgiveness. And she was just one of millions he murdered, the tip of the iceberg.”

“He couldn’t face the guilt?” Jack asked. “And that’s why he…?”

The Doctor nodded, lowering his eyes.

“Gutless coward,” Jack assessed.

“I told him I’d be there. I told him I’d help him through it…”

“Doctor, the most amazing shrink in the universe couldn’t have helped him if he had that much on his conscience.”

“I could’ve helped.”

“No, you couldn’t.” Jack gave the Doctor’s shoulder a sympathetic rub. “Even you have your limits.” He hesitated. “Am I right in thinking there was more between the two of you than just… whatever?”

The Doctor said nothing. After a few moments, he jerked his head in a brief nod.

Jack exhaled. “Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I wish you could’ve known him when he was young.” The Doctor took a fortifying swallow of tea, the hot beverage soothing his throat and returning his voice to normal; the alcohol also worked its magic, lowering the Doctor’s usual barriers. “He was intelligent and beautiful, so full of life! I wanted… I suppose I wanted to see him become that way again. I would’ve given anything to help him.”

“You can’t force healing on someone. You couldn’t pour courage into him. He had to find that inside himself, and even from what little I knew of him, I can’t see him digging that deep. He had two modes of operation: winning or running.”

“Damn straight,” the Doctor said. He drank some more and said, “The Time Lords never talked to him about what they’d done, never explained why. They put a block on his memory so he wouldn’t be able to think about it. In other cultures, he’d have been hailed as a hero; there’d have been ceremonies, rituals, and he’d have known he’d suffered for a reason. But he went through an agonizing experience that he couldn’t remember, and he’d suffered it alone, with nobody to comfort him afterwards or explain why it happened. That wounded child inside him never healed, not until I made him re-live the experience. And by then, it was too late; the damage couldn’t be undone.”

“Not unless _he_ wanted to undo it,” Jack countered. “Which he couldn’t face, because he knew the pain it would involve.” He squeezed the Doctor’s free hand. “You gave him more than he deserved, so don’t kick yourself too hard.”

The Doctor grunted.

A soft cry sounded from above, and the Doctor looked up. “Goodness, is that a pterodactyl?” he asked brightly.

Jack sighed. “I see the therapy session’s over.”

“ _Pterodactylus micronyx_ ,” the Doctor said. “Did it come through the rift?”

“Yeah.” Jack opened a large white plastic pail. He tossed a fish high overhead, watching as the prehistoric creature snatched it out of the air, throwing back its head and swallowing the fish whole. The Doctor observed the reptile’s behavior, his posture making it clear that he had no wish to discuss the Master any further.

“Watch this.” The Doctor hopped to his feet and, putting his hands to his mouth, made an uncanny noise that was half-whistle, half-hoot. The pterodactyl circled round, gliding down to the floor and landing about six feet away from the alien. Standing on its funny little feet, it resembled an enormous vampire bat.

“Uh, Doctor, you sure you know what you’re doing?”

The Doctor ignored him, repeating the noise. To Jack’s consternation, the pterodactyl began a peculiar dance, bobbing its head and opening out its wings a bit, puffing its chest.

“What the hell,” Jack laughed.

“It’s a courtship dance,” the Doctor grinned. “I was making the female’s mating call.”

“You tease.”

The pterodactyl continued its display, casting hopeful glances at the Doctor, first from one eye, then from the other.

“Poor bugger,” Jack said. “Probably hasn’t gotten laid in a few million years.”

The Doctor tossed a fish to the pterodactyl and sat again. “Do you let it outside?”

“Sometimes, at night,” Jack allowed. “If anyone sees it, we can debunk the stories pretty easily.” The creature had given up trying to mate with the Doctor and began preening its wing membranes. “It always comes back here, though.”

“He’ll probably live another twenty or thirty years,” the Doctor cautioned. “He’s young.”

“I’ll take care of it. I’m not getting any older.” Jack stood. “C’mon out back—I wanna show you something.”

He led the alien to cold storage. Selecting a drawer, he pulled it out and unzipped the body bag. “I think you might know this guy.”

The Doctor stared down at the frozen corpse of the Sycroax warrior.

“I can’t believe you never went looking for it,” Jack said. “You let an alien corpse and your own hand—which includes your complete genetic code—lay around on the streets of a major Earth city?”

“Good thing I have you lot to be cleanup crew, then.”

“Doctor, that’s careless.” Jack zipped the bag and pushed the drawer shut. “Look what happened when the Master stole your hand—that was bad enough. You know what’d happen if some human geneticist got hold of Time Lord DNA?”

“I’d only just regenerated,” the Doctor huffed. “I wasn’t thinking about small details.”

Jack opened a smaller drawer, pulling out two broadswords. “He didn’t have any marks on him—he died from the fall.”

“I pitched him off the ship when he tried to stab me in the back. I’d already fought him to a standstill. I made him swear never to return to Earth, and he reneged on his promise.” The Doctor shrugged. “I gave him one chance. I wasn’t giving him another one.”

Jack tossed one of the swords to him. “ _En garde_.”

“Oh, this is stupid, Jack.”

Harkness wouldn’t be deterred. He grinned, twirling the weapon. “Come on, none of my team knows how to use a sword.”

“You need a pet,” the Doctor smirked. “Apart from the pterodactyl, obviously.” He and Jack exchanged a few parries. “You’ve been waiting all this time for a swordfight with me?”

“Hey, I get bored easily,” Jack said. They circled around the room, metal ringing loudly on metal. Jack had never had the pleasure of handling such a well-made sword. Within a minute, though, the weapon popped out of his hand, flying in an arc and landing with a loud clang on the floor. He didn’t even see how it happened.

“Hey!” he sputtered.

“Nothing personal, but I’ve got a few centuries on you,” the Doctor said, tossing the sword back into its drawer. Jack sulked, doing the same with his.

The Doctor finished his tea, sinking once again into brooding contemplation.

“Why don’t you stick around a while?” Jack asked. “My team would love to meet you.”

“Sorry. I need to check in with Martha.” The Doctor nodded his chin forward at a nearby piece of equipment. “That’s a rift manipulator.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t like it.” The Doctor drew out his sonic screwdriver.

“Doctor—!” Jack grabbed his arm, pulling him back.

“Your team opened the rift and let Abaddon through. How many people died before you stopped him? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds?”

Jack ran a frustrated hand across the top of his head.

“And you chide me for leaving spare body parts around.”

“I’ll be more careful; I swear I will. The others… the others learned their lesson. They all apologized.”

The two men stood glaring at each other, and finally the Doctor backed down. The sonic screwdriver vanished inside his coat pocket.

“You’ve had your one chance,” he told Jack. “You’re not getting a second one. If anything else happens—”

“It won’t, I promise,” Jack said.

The Doctor stared at him, eyes hollow. “It was demons like Abaddon that made the Master crazy,” he revealed. “That was the experiment. The Time Lords used his mind, when he was a child, to draw a million demons like Abaddon into the void and trap them there.”

“Oh, God!” Jack’s mind reeled.

“But you’re not a child, and you should know better. It would take only one of those things to devastate the entire Earth.”

Jack swallowed hard. “All right.”

“And as long as we’re on the subject of time manipulation…” The Doctor grabbed Jack’s arm, and flipped open his vortex manipulator. Before Jack could stop him, the Doctor had aimed the sonic screwdriver down at the device. A loud, static crackle followed.

“Hey!”

“No more unsupervised time travel.”

“Bastard.”

“You do enough damage in one time stream.” The Doctor finished his tea, set down the mug, and headed for the exit. Jack tagged along.

“So, what’re you gonna do after this?”

“Same as always.” The Time Lord’s barriers were up, frustrating Jack terribly. He wanted to reach out to the Doctor, to offer him comfort or friendship or _something_ , but whatever it was the Doctor needed, Jack realized he couldn’t provide it.

_And the Master could?_

“You know, I did miss you,” Jack said, still disgruntled. They crossed the Roald Dahl Plass together. “Drop in sometime, okay? Maybe when it’s not a life-or-death crisis, or you’re just refueling the TARDIS.”

“Maybe.” The Doctor opened the TARDIS door. “Thank you, Jack,” he said, very sincere. “Thanks for everything.”

“Hey, no sweat,” Jack grinned. “All in a day’s work, right?”

The Doctor said nothing. He already looked several galaxies away.

Jack gave him a gentle clap on the shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

“You, too, Jack.” With that, the Doctor stepped inside the TARDIS and closed the door. Jack stood watching as the machine vanished, then he turned his steps back toward the Hub. As much as he loved his team, he wanted to enjoy a last day or two of peace before they came home and business as usual resumed.

(iii)

The mobile phone chirped, and Martha flipped open the device, smiling at the name on the caller ID screen.

“Hello?”

“Uh… hello. Is this Martha Jones?” The voice was young, male, cautious. Wonderfully familiar.

“What if it is?”

She heard a faint murmur of noise in the background, the polite ping of someone being paged. He was calling from the hospital.

“Why’ve you been phoning me? I keep getting hang-ups, and I finally had the calls traced to this number. You’ve been in the news—Saxon took your family hostage.”

“Yeah, he did.” Martha was pleased Tom had passed this small test of nerve and initiative. She couldn’t have tolerated a man with no spine—not now, not ever.

“I know this’ll sound pervy, but I can’t stop thinking about you, ever since I saw you on telly. Then you started ringing me up… it’s bizarre; I feel like I know you.” He sounded bewildered.

“Maybe you do.”

On the other end, he fell quiet. “I’ve never met you… have I?”

“Why don’t you buy me a coffee, and we’ll talk about it?”

He laughed, giddy and a bit shaky. “All right. My shift ends at… about four. Is that too late?”

“No, it’s perfect. Name the place.”

He mentioned a coffee shop near the hospital; Martha knew it well.

“All right,” she smiled. “See you there.” She folded the phone, tucking it into a pocket. What an odd yet perfect way to start things, a rendezvous that would combine the steady comfort of an established relationship with the thrill of a blind date, newness and familiarity at the same time. Martha grinned, pleased that she’d engaged Tom’s brain long before she’d engaged anything else.

She paced the house, glad he’d had called while the place was empty. Francine was off to an appointment with her therapist; Clive was out with Leo and the baby. Tish had opted for retail therapy with her friends.

In the kitchen, Martha paused at the window, noticing something different: the past year had heightened her awareness of any change in the environment. A tall blue box sat out on the sidewalk. Martha ran for the door, heart in her mouth.

(iv)

He stood on the sidewalk outside the TARDIS, not leaning insouciantly against it as he had so long ago—only a couple of weeks in ordinary Earth time, but closer to two years in Martha’s experience, if she counted the year that now no longer existed, the months they’d spent stuck in 1969, and the weeks they’d spent hiding out in 1913, as well as all their other travel time. He even was wearing the same suit she’d first seen on him: bright blue, with a wine-red necktie and Converse trainers in the same color.

She wondered how long he’d been gone in “Doctor-time.” He’d taken time to shower, shave, and change clothes, but his face still betrayed weariness and grief: there were deep shadows beneath his eyes, and lines Martha hadn’t—consciously—noticed before.

Hurrying across the street, she called out, “Are you all right? What happened?” She wondered suddenly where the Master was: surely the Doctor wouldn’t have left him unsupervised in the TARDIS. “Where’s…?”

“He’s dead.”

Martha stopped short, her heart jolting: this was in all honesty the last response she’d expected.

“Oh, God!” she shouted, dismayed not because she was sorry to see Saxon gone, but because she knew his death had hurt the Doctor. “What happened?”

“He ended it himself.”

“He committed suicide?”

The Doctor nodded, eyes dark, full of torment.

“I’m sorry,” Martha whistled. “Not that he’s dead, but for you.” She gave the Doctor a very quick hug, which the Doctor returned, more perfunctory than affectionate. So it seemed nothing between them had changed.

“How’re things here?” the Doctor asked.

“Let’s take a walk, and I’ll tell you.” They crossed the road; Martha locked up the house, and they set out along the sidewalk. The Doctor glanced curiously around the street, admiring the houses: all detached, most fronted with immaculate gardens and neat brick walls, a residential enclave of middle-class privilege.

“How’s your family?” he prompted.

“They’re coping. Tish is all right—she’s already got a couple of job offers, from people who saw her in the news and feel sorry for her.”

The Doctor’s mouth twitched into something resembling a smile. “I hope she’s a little more careful in her choice of employers from now on.”

Martha laughed. “Employment’s a way to keep busy ‘till she meets a sugar daddy.” The Doctor’s left eyebrow shot up, and Martha said, “I’m serious. That’s all she wants—rich, good-looking husband, a house like one of these—or better—and kids. Posh car. Domestic bliss. The works.”

Darkly, the Doctor said, “Look where that got Lucy Saxon.”

“It’s scary what can happen when you hitch yourself to someone else’s wagon.” Martha flexed her shoulders. “Better to stand on your own feet.”

“How’re your parents?”

“Good, considering. I dunno if they’ll patch things up, but they’re not at each other’s throats anymore. Mum’s on leave from work for another fortnight. Dad’s been visiting. I think I’ve talked to him more in the past few days than I have in my entire life.”

“For a year, they had no way of knowing if you were dead or alive.”

“I’m proud of him,” Martha said. “He smelled a rat with Saxon and stood up to him right away. Not like Mum, believing everything his goons told her.”

“She was being hypnotized, along with the rest of the world,” the Doctor reminded her.

“Bollocks,” Martha snorted. “Nobody needed to hypnotize her. She’s been like that her whole life: law and order, money and status, worship at the altar of convention. Why d’you think she was so keen to see me in med school? Another feather in her cap to have a doctor in the family. Martha Jones, M.D.! All Saxon’s goons needed to do was tell her I was consorting with the wrong types, and she did the rest herself.”

“She _is_ your mother,” the Doctor pointed out. “It’s in her nature to worry about you.”

“She’s eaten up with guilt now,” Martha said. “You have no idea how sorry she feels, especially after she saw what the Master did to you. She feels horrible for ever believing him.”

“She shouldn’t. He’s—he was—an incredibly powerful hypnotist, very persuasive.”

“Dad resisted him.”

“Your father was already used to rebelling. His neural wiring is different.”

Martha picked at the skin of her hands, the tough calluses on her palms that she’d probably have for the rest of her life.

“Tish said…” She didn’t look at the Doctor.

“Said what?” he prompted.

“On the ship—she said he used to…” Martha trailed off.

“I used to let the Master beat me up, to keep him away from her.”

“Doctor, how _could_ you?” Martha asked, distressed more by his nonchalant statement of fact than by the confirmation of Tish’s story. “You were so old—you couldn’t even stand up!”

“I have ways of coping with physical punishment that your sister doesn’t. She’s young and pretty, and she was vulnerable—to be blunt, I was afraid he was going to rape her, and if I could spare her that, I’d do it, no matter what it took.”

Martha just stared at him, jaw slack.

“You never stop amazing me,” she said.

“I’d have done the same for anyone.” He shrugged off the matter as trivial. “Besides, it was me he really wanted to hurt.”

“So, what happened to him?” asked Martha. “Can you… talk about it?”

They crossed the street and started back down the block. The Doctor had shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, gaze downcast.

“I took him to a hospital,” he began. “A mental hospital on another planet. I read his mind and found that the drumming was the after-effect of an experiment conducted on him when he was eight.”

“What kind of experiment?”

“A horrible one. It left him deranged. The damage wasn’t immediately obvious, but his madness and violence got worse and worse as he aged.”

“And you cured him?”

“I’m not sure a real cure was even possible, but yes, I made his symptoms stop.”

“And he couldn’t handle it?”

“No. Without the drumming to make him mad, he came face-to-face with his own evil, everything he’d done. He had no way to—I tried to help him, but he just…”

“I’m sorry. That took a lot of work, and it was a shitty way to repay you.” Martha slid an arm through his. “Though I wouldn’t have expected anything else from him.”

“Yeah.”

“I know he was the only other Time Lord, but I think he’s better off dead. Everyone else is certainly better off with him gone. Of all the Time Lords to turn up alive, it was your rotten luck that it was him.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor agreed, almost inaudible now.

The blue box was visible, small at this distance but getting bigger as they approached it. Martha hated to add any more to his burden of solitude, but she knew that in this case, she had to act in the interests of her own self-preservation.

“Listen,” she began. “I can’t go with you any more.”

He stopped short, staring down at her. “Why not?” He sounded more hurt than she’d expected.

“I need to finish my training, take my exams,” she explained. “And my family—I need to be there for them. This has all been so rough on them, and nobody else knows what we went through. Even Leo doesn’t remember. He believes us, but it’s not the same as knowing it _here_.” Martha slapped her gut. “Everyone thinks we were taken hostage for less than a day… Mum’s friends already think she’s being histrionic, milking the attention.”

“I understand,” the Doctor said. “I’ll miss you, but I know you need to look after them.”

“The hospital’s been really good,” Martha said. “They’ve loaned me books and stuff, everything I need to study with. That’s what I’ve been up to most of this week, just getting my life sorted. I’m amazed I remember anything; school feels like it was ages ago.”

He put an arm around her shoulder. “You’ll make a fantastic doctor.”

She grinned. The TARDIS was closer now. Funny how it had come to seem so much like home, more than her flat, more than her parents’ house.

“Let me get my stuff,” she said.

Inside, she was pleased to see he’d fully repaired the console. Martha didn’t give herself time to let the ship work its seductive magic; she feared that if she nipped off for “one more” adventure, she’d never return to her own life. She realized with a shock how few things she’d brought on board, how little there was to bundle into her small backpack. The room she’d been using as her own looked so impersonal. Before long, some other traveling companion might sleep here. Whoever it was, Martha wished them well.

He was zipping around the console, and when she emerged, he flashed his knee-melting smile. In that instant, the resemblance between the Doctor and the Master had never been so apparent. How charming both men were, how persuasive, and how special they could make one feel. The Doctor might have lacked the Master’s evil, but he was no less shameless about taking advantage of the way humans reacted to him.

“You know,” he began, “we could still—”

“No.” Her voice was more forceful than it needed to be.

“Oh,” he said, the veneer of happiness melting away.

Martha knew if she didn’t speak her mind now, she never would. “I think there’s something you need to say to me.”

Humble now, he said, “Martha—you were incredible. You saved the world, not to mention the universe.”

“And your wrinkled old arse,” Martha said. “Don’t forget that.”

“Yes, I was just getting to that bit.”

“I spent so much time inside this thing,” Martha said, circling her gaze around the console room, “thinking I was second-best. But I’m not.”

“You’re second to no-one,” he told her. “I can’t thank you enough for everything you did.”

“Doctor, why didn’t you tell me Rose was trapped in another dimension? Here I was, thinking you’d just had a bad split with a girlfriend.”

He looked down at his hands, toying with something on the console. “It hurt too much.”

“Yeah, well, it hurt me thinking I was just some bird you’d picked up on the rebound.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Were you in love with her?”

“I should think that would be obvious.”

“You should’ve just said so.”

“Would you still have come with me?” he asked.

“I dunno,” she admitted. “I loved traveling with you, but… it wasn’t easy, feeling like the second Mrs. de Winter all the time.”

“Like who?”

“Forget it,” she laughed. “It was something in a book.”

He grinned, too, the tension between them ebbing away. “She never could’ve done what you did.”

“Who, Rose?”

“She never would’ve left the _Valiant_. What you did—talking to people, getting them to believe in someone they’d never met, traveling the world by yourself—I’m not saying she wouldn’t have had the strength for that part, but she would’ve had a much harder time leaving me on that ship with the Master, unable to defend myself. You did the right thing, even though it was difficult for you. That’s courage, Martha—the very definition of it.”

If fortune had just rained down a shower of diamonds on Martha, she couldn’t have felt happier than she did at that moment.

“Thanks,” she said, unable to keep an enormous smile off her face.

He circled around and pulled her into his arms, a real hug this time.

“Thank you so much for everything,” he said. “I know I was an arse with you, and I’m so sorry about that.”

She hugged him back, hard. “It’s all right,” she said. “I just wish I’d known a little sooner what you were going through.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Do one thing for me, Martha,” he said. “Keep on being incredible. If you ever run into trouble, remember the moment you laughed in the Master’s face. After that, you can do anything.”

That sounded too much like goodbye for Martha’s tastes. “Don’t think you’ve seen the last of me,” she said, still grinning. She pulled out her souped-up mobile phone and dropped it into his coat pocket. “It works both ways.”

“All right,” he smiled.

Not wanting the farewell to become maudlin, Martha gave him one last, quick hug, shouldered her bag, and marched out of the TARDIS. On the sidewalk outside her family’s house, she turned to watch the blue box fade away amidst its usual rumbling groan. She waited until the last sonic whine had dissipated, leaves and detritus blowing in the wind kicked up by the ship’s departure. Martha stared at the spot where it had been, feeling empty, but also enjoying a moment of closure—almost of vindication. Then she unlocked the house and hurried inside. She didn’t have much time to get ready for her date with Tom.

In a moment of panic, she wondered what to wear: her clothes had all been destroyed with her flat, and most of the things still in the closet of her childhood bedroom were dated. She fretted; then, on a naughty impulse, she skipped up the stairs to see what she could nick from Tish.

Epilogue

_You Can’t Always Get What You Want_

When the ship was once again spinning through the time vortex, the Doctor resolved to deal with the most difficult matter first: how to dispose of the Master’s clothes.

He had no wish to create a shrine to his dead lover. In the past, he’d dealt with the loss of companions in various ways—sealing off the door to Susan’s room, jettisoning Romana’s room entirely. But the Master was different; he’d been the only other Time Lord in existence, and his loss carried with it a far heavier weight of emotional turmoil. With his death, the Doctor had lost the final piece of Gallifrey. If he ever was to move forward from this tragedy, the Doctor knew he couldn’t keep the Master’s clothes like a crutch or a security blanket.

Still, he wanted this act to carry some significance, and the Doctor knew the best way was to create something positive, no matter how small, out of his loss.

He brought the TARDIS back a few years, materializing the ship in a nondescript car park. Outside, he found vehicles baking beneath an indifferent sun. Beyond the lot, buildings rose, and in the far distance, to the west, the Doctor saw the shape of mountains. A loose page of a newspaper blew across the asphalt, carried by the warm summer wind. The Doctor leaned down to snag the scrap. Assuming the paper was recent, it was the August of the year 2004, and he was somewhere in Alberta, Canada.

He wandered the streets of the sleepy town until he found what he sought: a public drop-box for the charitable donation of clothing. The Doctor reached into the linen bag, pulling out the Master’s socks, undershirt, and boxer shorts; these, he quickly disposed of in a nearby rubbish bin, not giving himself time to look at or smell any of the items. The Master’s scent, especially, would have sent him into a paroxysm of weeping.

The suit, tie, and shirt, he would give away. The clothes were expensive, handsomely tailored, as good as new. He hoped that some struggling young Canadian, perhaps newly graduated from university and in need of business attire, would make good use of these garments. As he lifted the bag to push it into the bin, the Doctor heard a faint metallic clink. Surprised, he pushed his hand down into the folds of black fabric.

A smaller drawstring bag had been placed at the bottom of the sack. The Doctor opened it up, flummoxed to see the Master’s elaborate, expensive wristwatch, his wedding band, his cuff links, and his Gallifreyan signet ring. Evidently, Vamana’s people had stripped the Master’s body completely before shrouding it.

He kept the jewelry, depositing the clothes into the bin, and turned away, wondering again what to do. His subconscious mind must have known, because his feet carried him down another city block, where he found a small pawn shop. A pair of identical Chinese twins ran the place, and the women asked him no questions about the jewelry, more excited that he spoke to them in Mandarin than by anything he had to offer. After seeing so many goods come and go over the years, they’d no doubt lost any curiosity about the stories behind them. The watch fetched the highest sum. The Doctor kept only the signet ring, accepting the wad of cash the sisters handed over along with his receipt.

Circling around the city block to return to the TARDIS, he found a soup kitchen run by a heavyset swarthy young man in a clerical collar.

“Here,” the Doctor said, thrusting the money into his hand.

“What?!?” the man sputtered, gawking at the cash. “What… you… where’d this come from…?” But the Doctor was already gone.

He ambled down the sidewalk, watching the cars and trucks whip past him, moving as if in slow motion amongst the human throng, people so oblivious to the abundant blessings around them: the solid security of the planet beneath their feet, the presence of their fellow-beings. He turned over the ring in his pocket; in his mind, he traveled across the globe to England. Right now, Rose Tyler would be eighteen years old, Jack Harkness watching over her like a guardian angel. Martha Jones would be about twenty, still in the early days of her medical training. He thought of them, his friends, those precious sparks of light, diamonds in the sky.

Back in the ship, he took out the ring and gave it a closer examination. He admired the design, a stylized depiction of Gallifrey and its two suns. Something about the ring struck him as odd—nothing visual, but he detected something out of the ordinary nevertheless. He focused on the ring, letting his telepathic senses guide him. Grunting with surprise, he pulled out his sonic screwdriver, passing it back and forth over the platinum band. The tip of the device lit up, glowing with a blue pulse.

“You wily bastard,” the Doctor breathed. In that moment, the guilt and anguish left him completely, and while he would always grieve the loss of his friend, the pain became more diffuse, more muted. He shook his head, marveling that he could have underestimated the Master so completely. He thought of that moment on the _Valiant_ when Lucy had tried to shoot her husband. That wasn’t an attempt at vengeance by a battered spouse. Oh, no, that had been a contingency plan, almost set into motion by a devoted acolyte. The Doctor remembered the Master’s expression, too subtle to read. It hadn’t been anger or shock, but rather frustration that his escape had been thwarted.

The signet ring was a component of a chameleon arch, a miniature version of the fob watch that both the Doctor and the Master had employed. The Master, upon his death, had poured his essence into the ring. His memories, consciousness, personality—everything was contained in this tiny vessel. Slide that ring onto the finger of any sentient being, and the Master’s Time Lord DNA would over-write the biology of its host.

“You weren’t escaping your own conscience,” the Doctor realized out loud. “You were escaping _me_.” With a chill, he remembered the three aspirin tablets the Master had left for him, the invitation to join him in death. The Master couldn’t abide the thought of traveling with the Doctor, a living reproach to him for all his wrongdoings. So he’d ended his life, probably assuming that the ring would ultimately fall into the hands of some curious being, hoping that he could start his existence again elsewhere, in another body, free of the Doctor.

“Now, there’s irony for you,” the Doctor said, holding the ring in his palm. “You couldn’t bear the thought of being my prisoner. But that’s exactly what you’re going to be, for all time now.”

(ii)

The TARDIS was enormous—almost infinite, containing rooms of which even the Doctor was unaware. His companions had all amused themselves by exploring the ship and trying to find where it ended; not one had succeeded. A few of the bolder ones had asked the Doctor where he slept, to which the Doctor had always shrugged and laughed. Not one of them, not even Romana, had ever seen his quarters.

He could tell from the tiny console that the door to the anteroom had been recently opened: the Master had used the Doctor’s severed hand to gain access. The Doctor used his thumbprint now to open the door again. Inside, the Master would have found a second door, this one opened by a complex password and a retinal scan. Even if he’d been able to crack the password, the retinal scan would have stymied him. Sure enough, the monitor revealed that the Master had solved the password, but that had only opened a tiny panel, behind which sat the scanning device. The Doctor smiled as he pressed his face to the scanner, imagining how his old foe must have cursed.

The computer recognized his retinal pattern, and the door to his inner sanctum slid open.

He so rarely ventured in here any more. The tiny space had been modeled on his monk-like academy cell: just a narrow bed, a chair, and a small trunk. When the Doctor needed to sleep, he would kip on a bed in another room, not wanting his companions to see this sad little fragment of his lonely youth.

With a deep breath, he lifted the lid of the trunk. He tried to brace himself, but the tears started as soon as he set eyes on Romana’s straw hat. A few strands of gold hair still clung to the dried grass on the inside. Her Paris hat; she’d worn it in the City of Light that magical spring when their love had blossomed, and the world seemed to have been created just for them…

Beneath it lay his folded everyday Time Lord robe, scarlet and orange, which he hadn’t donned since fleeing Gallifrey so many centuries earlier. Near the robe lay the gaudy purple signet ring he’d made from the stone he’d found that day, swimming with Koschei. Since his first regeneration, the ring hadn’t fit. The purple in the stone almost perfectly matched the purple of Rose’s shirt, which she’d left hanging in the console room after one of their mad trysts. He picked up Ace’s laboratory notebook, full of scrawled chemical formulae and equations. He touched the cover lightly, hoping that whatever path she’d chosen had brought her happiness, then returned the notebook to its place.

His hand brushed over a pair of lovely silver combs engraved with Gallifreyan script: Susan had used these to hold back her hair before she’d cut it short, in 1960s London fashion. Tears spilled down his face: she’d returned to Gallifrey after the death of her human husband, and she’d been an advanced academy student when the Daleks had attacked. She’d died trying to protect the youngsters, and all for nothing: the Daleks had blasted Prydon Tower into dust.

His gaze fell on another bound notebook: an artist’s sketchpad, in which Tegan had sometimes doodled. After her departure, he’d been flummoxed to discover that it contained sketch after sketch of him: youthful, fair-haired, smiling. She was gone now, of course, by the year 2004, she’d been dead of cancer for nearly a decade.

Atop the sketchpad lay a folded piece of parchment. The blob of red wax that once had sealed it was broken. The Doctor took it out, held it to his lips: Reinette’s final words to him. He thought of the life the Master had thrown away, how much Reinette would have given for even one of those days. He didn’t unfold the letter; he’d memorized the brief message, the words etched into his mind for eternity. _Just once_. If only he could see her again, just once.

He set the letter back in the trunk, lifting out a square envelope whose paper had yellowed with time. He slid out the square, stiff card, but it wasn’t the formal invitation on the front he sought, rather, the handwritten message on the back.

_My Dear Doctor,_

_Mrs. Lethbridge-Stewart and I would be so delighted to have you as our guest for the holiday. I know you don’t celebrate Christmas, but won’t you please at least join us for dinner? We hate to think of you spending the day alone._

_Yours,_

_Alistair_

The tears became gasping sobs as the Doctor read and re-read this missive from another long-lost friend. There had been so many of them. And the small collection in this trunk represented only a fraction of the lives who’d touched his: he had no mementos of brave, intelligent Barbara, or loyal, steadfast Jamie, or spirited, funny Jo, the first human with whom he’d fallen in love. Leela, Nyssa, Turlough—they’d left nothing of themselves, but he remembered them dearly all the same.

He thought of what he’d said to the Master, how his love for them gave him a shield against even the most powerful evil. Perhaps this grief was the price he paid for that protection. Certainly it was the price he paid for allowing himself to experience their love.

And now the Master’s ring—and the Master himself—would join this private graveyard of loss. There would be no resurrection, not now. They’d been so many things to each other: mentor and student, friends, lovers, bitter enemies, doctor and patient, and yes, master and servant. He hated that their final relationship would be that of jailer and prisoner, but he reminded himself sternly that the Master had chosen this fate for himself.

The Doctor kissed the ring, held it briefly to his chest, hoping that if Koschei were capable of awareness, he would hear the Doctor’s inner monologue.

_I promised you I’d care for you and look after you_ , the Doctor thought. _And I will. I’ll always be sorry you chose this way out, but I’ll never regret that I loved you_. Maybe now, in death, the Master would find the peace that had eluded him in life.

The Doctor set the ring beside his own in the trunk and lowered the lid. Like the Koschei of Earth legend, the Master had buried his heart, not in a needle beneath a mountain, but in a ring hidden in a trunk in the depths of an ancient spaceship. The Doctor stood, leaving the sad past behind him, wandering on unsteady legs back to the console room.

(iii)

He didn’t know where he’d go next, so he opted not to set any of the controls; he’d just materialize and let the TARDIS take him where it would.

The moment he flipped the lever, a tremendous blow rocked the ship, and the Doctor found himself flying head over heels through the air, literally somersaulting over the double seat and onto the metal grating of the floor.

“ _What!_ ” he shrieked, spinning around, hopping up to all fours. The impregnable walls of the TARDIS had been breached by the bow of what appeared to be an enormous oceangoing vessel.

“ _What?_ ” He felt the touch of cold wind on his face. The deep, resonant blast of the ship’s horns vibrated in his molars.

He knew those horns. He knew that boat. But the smell of the air was all wrong—not north Atlantic, not remotely. He reached forward, picking up the life buoy that had landed nearby. Even before he turned it over, he knew what he’d find.

He stared up again, incredulity and shock churning inside him.

“What?”

**The End**


End file.
